Ramblings Around the Neighborhood

Despite the drought, things are happening all around. One of the things is the death of many of the native plants I planted last month near the back deck. They just weren't thriving, and against my better judgement, I kept watering them (it's been hot and dry after all, and the leaves were all curling up). This didn't seem to help. Then last night, while watering again, I noticed one of the monkey flowers looked like it's root ball had been pushed up out of the ground...and so did another (they were both dead - over night). I took a step into the garden and sank. Moles. The #*&^$#( things have tunneled under the garden and have exposed the roots to air rather than soil - they dried out from below!!! I am not a happy camper. I've often had warm feelings for moles, but this could be the end of that.

Meanwhile, on a more cheerful note, I've been watching and listening to many of the birds, especially while Toby and I do our evening walk. The dicksissels are back! It took me a while, but this unusual bird call caught in my mind and eventually I saw and identified the bird - the dicksissel, which I saw for the first time last year. This year I tried photographing it - I think it is an extremely camera-shy bird, but I persevered, and finally got a few shots that are okay.  Ta-da!

And here is what it sounds like. It is the rough "dick dick dick sissel", not the sweet floating song you hear first.

  

Let's see...what else. Oh - I found two spicebush swallowtail butterfly caterpillars on my spice bushes! Very exciting - this is why I planted them! The first is the younger - when very young they look like bird poop.

 The older instar looks like a green worm with huge eye spots - all the better for scaring off predators, my dear.  Like all good spicebush swallowtail larvae, it was rolled up in a leaf for the night.

 I found this beautiful egg under the maple tree where my feeders are. I brought it in and looked it up in my guide to nests, nestlings and eggs; it's an oriole egg. The big hole in the side suggests another bird broke it open and probably ate the contents - Gary suggested the likely candidate was a grackle.

 

Then last night, an indigo bunting (my first of the year in the neighborhood) was singing down at the edge of the woods, and it flew to the ground not 20 feet from me - and sat there!  Did I have the camera?  No, of course not.

When we returned home and cut across the yard, a low brown movement near the fence caught my eye.  I thought it was a woodchuck, but it was TWO baby raccoons!!!  One was inside the fence, the other outside, and they were desperate to get to each other.  I dragged T around the house and put him inside, grabbed my camera and went out the back door, intending to get a photo or two and then shoo the trapped raccoon out through the "gate" I opened in the fence.  Here's what happened:

The little beggers bolted up the fenceline, in the wrong direction! (Can you find them both?)

I tried heading the trapped one off at the pass, but it only turned and made little growly noises at me - it wouldn't turn away from me and move toward the opening.

But how cute is that?  Is there anything cuter than a baby raccoon?

It's sibling was in the tall grasses on the far side of the fence (far being relative - it was only about 4 inches away, but with the fence it might as well have been four miles).

After it decided to come toward me (see above video), I decided to find a Plan B. My fence is not the sturdiest thing, but it is sturdy enough that just raising up one section is not easy. I was able to pull it up about three inches and the little one scooted underneath, the two happy to be reunited in the tall grasses.

I waited a few minutes and then let Toby out. Oops!

Look at that fur stand on end!

 He was simply beside himself. 

I thought the babies would've moved on, but they stayed in the grasses - waiting for mom?  I finally had to put T back inside while I did my chores.  By 2:30 AM they had moved on.

Spring?

I've been away the last few days. "Away" meaning I took time off from work. It was beautiful weather - I should've been out doing naturalist stuff. Instead, I did household stuff - cleaning, grocery shopping (a day-long event here in Newcomb because it requires a trip to Glens Falls), and reading. And even though the days were bright and sunny, with scads of blue sky and sunshine, the wind was bitter cold!!! Still, things have been melting. The roadsides are all covered with snert (or is it snirt?) - snow and dirt, or dirty snow. The snow away from the roadsides is alternately rotting and freezing. South-facing hillsides are bare. In other words, it looks like April out there, not early March.

This morning when I went out to fill the feeders (birds have been Spartan lately - even the blue jays are not wiping out the peanuts on a daily basis), I was shocked to see the following signs of spring:

1) Tulips, up almost two inches!



2) Daffodils up about an inch, pushing steadily through the leaves!



3) Azalea buds starting to swell and turn green!

4) The rhododendron leaves turning green!

At 8:30 AM, even Toby was lying down and soaking up some rays.

Even my 50 gallon "rain barrel", which collects the water dripping from my leaky gutters, was full of water. WATER. Not ice! After a clear night! The skim of ice on top was so thin it only took a gentle tap to shatter it. It's been full of mostly ice for weeks.


It's just too early for these signs of spring. Either we are going to have spring really really early this year, or we will get dumped on and all these plants will be sorry they put in an appearance so soon in the season.

When I got to work, I noticed that another warm weather creature had been out and about:

This is the remains of the bag of solidified bacon grease I had at the feeders. Remember the raccoon from my last post? I'd give good odds that it (or one of its friends) finally discovered this high-energy snack a couple nights ago and made short work of it.

Our snow stick is down to about 12 inches. More sunny weather is predicted for this week. It sure seems like spring.

Early Morning Tracks

I was the first person in to work yesterday morning, and after two days of being closed, the only tracks on the driveway were those left by animals passing in the night. What a treat to see such beautiful clear footprints in the frozen slush.

Fox and raccoon - a nice combination.

I'm always delighted to see raccoon tracks. Around here, where the winters can be brutally cold at times, raccoons only come out when the weather turns mild. When we have a warm night (warm, of course, being a relative term) we pretty much know that the raccoons will be out and about.



Raccoon tracks are always so easy to identify: they look like tiny human hand prints. Five toes, front and back. And when they walk, they place a hind foot next to a front foot, leaving a perfect impression of each, side-by-side.

This raccoon was headed toward the building, so I followed its tracks to see where it went. I suspected it was headed to the back deck and the suet (we bring the birdfeeders in at night, but the suet stays out). I was surprised to find the suet still in tact. It seems the raccoon had other things on its mind, for it made a beeline past the building and down the hill.

This is about the time of year raccoon mate, so we speculated that perhaps this was a male going in search of a female. Whatever its mission, it was nice to see its tracks.

Always Something New to Learn

This last Saturday I went to a tracking workshop down at the Wilton Preserve near Saratoga. It was led by Vince Walsh, a tracker and outdoor enthusiast who is the founder of Kawing Krow Awareness Center in Greenfield. I participated in a tracking class with him last year at the Paul Smiths VIC and knew that I would learn something new if I did it again.

Fellow nature bloggers Jackie and Sue were also there, so it was a nice little reunion for us. We started off indoors with a quick overview of tracking, and then headed outside where the tracks were. There wasn't a lot of snow, but we all strapped on our snowshoes anyway. And then we were off.



The first thing Vince did when we headed out was to make a couple prints in the snow: his mitten and a snowshoe. We were to note how they looked and compare them to what they would look like later after the sun had had a chance to work on them. So, looking at them in the first photo, when they are fresh, we can see that the edges of each track are very sharp and distinct.

Here they are about an hour and a half later. Note that already the edges are softer, rounder in appearance, melted by the sun. Even the definition in the bottom is not as sharp.

This is how one learns to age tracks. You make a track and record how it looks. Check it again in an hour, note the changes, and make a fresh one next to the first. Come back in another hour and check both tracks. Note the differences and make a third track. Etc. Do this in the rain, in the wind, in the cold, in the heat. At night, in the morning dew...the possibilities are endless. I've never really had the patience to do this; someday, maybe.

Our first set of non-human tracks were found along the parking lot. Many participants thought they must be deer tracks. I was leaning towards Rover (we were at the parking lot, there was pee on the signposts, and we could see other visitors with their pooches heading out onto the trails). Vince dug through the snow to first determine how deep the snow was and what the snow layers were like.

The snow was about 8" deep, with an icy layer about 2" down, formed when we had all that rain a couple weeks ago.

Next he dug out the snow around the track, to determine just how deep the track went. It only went as far as the icy layer. So, this animal wasn't too heavy (a deer, with it's greater weight and sharper hooves would've easily punched through this frozen layer). Using gentle movements, Vince felt in the track to see if he could feel any toe-prints. The final analysis: domestic dog.

I was very surprised to come across this deceased honey bee on top of the snow. Why had it been flying about in the winter? Where was its hive? Is this a trait of the "colony collapse" honey bees are suffering - like bats with white-nose syndrome flying around outside their caves in the winter?

We found a set of mink tracks down by the bridge, where the pond drained into a small stream. Here Vince is pointing out the classic 2x2 footprints of the weasel family.

On the little overlook by the pond, the discussion probed techniques for aging the fox tracks that crossed the ice. The tracks were dusted on the inside with snow, so the animal had to have passed this way while it was still snowing. The consensus view was that it was snowing lightly between 4:00 and 7:30 the night before, so the animal must've crossed the pond sometime in the early evening. Because there wasn't a lot of snow in the tracks, the group decided it must've been there about 7:00 PM.

The following set of tracks confounded the group for quite some time. Several folks thought it was a porcupine trail, possibly influenced by the fisher tracks they had just been discussing. Whatever this animal was, it apparently had shortish legs, as evidence by the feet dragging through the snow as it climbed the hill.

I was leaning more toward raccoon, mostly because I didn't see any of the classic tail-swishes in the trail (although the snow wasn't very deep, so perhaps the tail would've have dragged). There were also no quills to be found, and no yellow smear of urine. What I did see that made me think raccoon was a larger footprint next to a smaller footprint - classic 'coon tracks (hindfoot landing next to front foot as the animal walks along).

We followed the tracks as far as they went, which was the cabin you see at the top of the photo. Here they disappeared. Vince crawled under the cabin, determining that this would be a good place for an animal (like a raccoon, or a skunk) to hole up on a chilly day. Final conclusion: raccoon.

Fox tracks also went up the hill. We found a really nice scent post, which everyone was encouraged to sniff. It was musky and skunkish - red fox.

There were squirrel tracks a-plenty. Because these are old hat to me, I didn't take any pictures of them, but perhaps I should've done because there was a nice comparison of grey vs red squirrels. I did get a shot of a rather impressive midden pile the squirrels had made by a pile of logs.

We found a beautiful set of fox tracks that told a great story. The fox was trotting along when it suddenly veered off to the right, stopping at the stems you see between Vince's legs here. I had seen these earlier, and my interpretation was that the fox smelled or heard something to the right that caught its attention. Just beyond this spot (behind Vince) was a cluster of white pine seedlings, and scattered across the snow all around them were mouse tracks. I figured the fox was checking out the hunting potential, and, determining it wasn't worthwhile, it returned to its original path and continued trotting southward (off the left side of the photo).

What Vince saw, however, was that the fox came along, suddenly veered to the right, and plunged its snout into the snow, using its highly sensitive whiskers to detect of there were any critters moving about under the snow that might make a nice snack. Not detecting any, it returned to its original mission and exited the scene.

The difference is that what Vince saw as a face plant in the snow I took as a footprint. The clue he saw was the distinct "V" shape made in the snow by the fox's lower jawbones (the print at the top of this photo).

Here is the face plant close up. Note the upside-down "V".

We continued following this fox. Trying to ascend a very steep slope reinforced for me the importance of using snowshoes that have teeth on the bottom ("Slip Slidin' Away" quickly became my theme song, for I was wearing my old wood and rawhide 'shoes). We followed our fox into a clearing where it went up on a small rise (a stump or rock buried under the snow) and left a scent post.

This scent post was most revealing, for now we knew we were following a female fox. How? It took some work, but we finally teased out all the clues. First, we know the fox was travelling towards the left of this picture. It stepped up on this object and squatted to make the scent post. Now, contrary to popular belief, male and females will both squat at times to pee, so the fact that the animal squatted wasn't the big clue. What was, though, was the position of the urine in relation to the feet: it is behind the feet. Had this been a male, the urine would've been squirted forward of the feet. (Isn't it amazing how simple these clues can be once you know what to look for?)

For me, this and the face plant were the highlights of our tracking adventure. It was now headed for 3:00 and the sun was already getting low in the sky. The program had run overtime (as tracking programs will do), so the group began to disperse - places to go, things to do. It would've been fun to follow this fox further, to see what else she might do, but our time was up.

Vince will be doing another tracking program on 6 March at the Paul Smiths VIC. I know I will be there - "dirt time" with an expert tracker is always a good way to spend a day. The program requires pre-registration, so if you are in the area and would like to participate, give 'em a call: 518-327-3000.