The moose with goofy “elk” antlers. Never seen anything like this.
Here’s the front foot of a skunk that one of our mountain lions killed.
Tracks of a gray jay. Not much detail but all jays have very narrow feet and steller’s jays are slightly longer.
Here is a steller’s jay track. They are a little over 2″ long.
I’m excited for another season of snow tracking. I wish we hadn’t trampled everything but there are two animals moving up the middle of the picture. On the left is a coyote and on the right is a marten. Snow tracking forces the tracker to focus more on gaits and stride length than just details of a clear track. Here the marten is bounding, making a pattern very similar to the trotting coyote but the distance between the tracks is too long to be a trotting coyote.
The vigorous territorial marking of a red squirrel on a broken branch.
Nice marten tracks. There are also jumping mice, a coyote and other tracks in the picture.
Here are a few pictures of bears ripping open or turning over logs looking for ants or grubs to eat.
Look closely for the grizzly tracks and bite mark on the sign that he pulled up out of the ground. As a tracker my favorite skill to practice is “trailing” – following the tracks of animals. Sometimes we loose the trail and spend hours searching for it…
I would love to find out what these grubs are. I’ve been trying to pay more attention to insect sign and found these grubs infesting Rudbeckia spp. A couple weeks later I got to watch a downy woodpecker pecking at the seed heads, trying to get the mystery grubs out.
Here’s what it looked like after the downy got the grub out.
A mystery bone that still haunts me. I think it is a piece of bird vertebrae. It was found in a mountain lion scat so we would love to identify what animal it belongs to. Please let me know if you have ideas.
The next project I’m excited about is a bighorn sheep horn bow. Stay tuned for updates on my progress…
Natural Skills 