Travels etched in snow

All spring, summer and fall, animals come and go across our woodland and lakefront properties, but we barely notice because they leave little evidence.

In winter, though we easily see their tracks in the snow. Your snow-covered lake is a great place to track wildlife: The trails traverse open space instead of weaving among trees and brush.

The only trouble with winter tracking is that it can be hard to identify the actual prints. The animals’ footfalls don’t leave clear impressions in powdery snow the way they would in mud or soft sand. You need to go by clues such as the track pattern, the sizes of the impressions, and the spacing of the prints.

The New Hampshire Fish and Game Department offers a free “Pocket Guide to Animal Tracks” (http://www.wildlife.state.nh.us/Wildlife/Wildlife_PDFs/Track_Card.pdf). Its detailed images of the various prints won’t help you as much in winter as in other seasons, but the guide does include the types of track pattern and the typical print sizes.

Anyway, an essential step in tracking winter wildlife is knowing who is out and about. For example, you won’t find bear tracks in snow, since the bears are denned up until spring. Beavers don’t hibernate but typically store enough food underwater to get them through the winter, so they’re not seen very often.

So how can you identify those trails in the snow? The New Hampshire guide identifies four basic track patterns. First are the hoppers, chiefly squirrels and rabbits. Squirrels leave roughly box-shaped sets of tracks, a larger pair (the hind paws) toward the front in the direction of travel. At each hop, the front paws land first, and the rear paws leapfrog past them. Rabbit track sets are similar except that the front paws fall one behind the other instead of side by side.

Then there are tracks that proceed in a nearly straight line. Foxes, coyotes, bobcats and deer share this pattern. Deer hooves commonly exert enough pressure to leave well-defined cloven marks in the snow. As for foxes and coyotes, absent clear paw impressions, track spacing can help you tell the difference: 14 to 16 inches for red foxes, 19 to 21 inches for coyotes.

Raccoons, porcupines, opossums, skunks and muskrats leave pair of tracks, one behind the other. The sizes can help you differentiate. Otters, fishers, minks and weasels leave pairs of prints side by side (and otters, as mentioned last week, leave their unmistakable slide marks).

The recent thaw has eliminated much of the tracking snow on the lakes, but more snow will come. Consider heading out (when convinced that the ice is safe) and trying to determine just who made all those trails in the snow.

Just you and the otter

If you live on a lake, one of winter’s pleasures is walking the snow-covered ice, until the snow gets too deep, after which you can walk it on snowshoes.

You soon find you’re not the only one who takes these walks – animals will have left their tracks before you. Imagine about six inches of snow on the ice and a soft snow falling, a couple of inches of new powder already down, as you embark in your insulated boots.

You stay close to shore, because it’s a bit too early in the season to trust the open ice, but also because this is where you’ll find most of the hoof and paw prints. Now and then an animal will shortcut across a bay, or across the lake proper, but mostly the tracks hug the shoreline, food and cover close by.

Not far on your walk, you come upon sausage-shaped depressions in the snow, each six to eight feet long, paw prints between. These are the slide marks of otters. You know they’re fresh because they remain well defined, the edges not even slightly softened by the falling snow.

You may not like assigning human qualities to animals, but when it comes to otters, you can’t helping thinking that here are creatures who know how to have fun. They don’t walk or trot along – they run and slide. Yes, they take a few running steps, then flop on their bellies and glide over the snow. A few more steps and glide again.

And so it goes, the tracks continuing as you walk along. The paw prints’ orientation shows you and the otter are heading in the same direction. You keep your eyes forward, hoping to catch a glimpse, since these marks can’t be more than a few minutes old. Here and there the trail heads up into the woods, then emerges again on the ice.

You never see the otter, just follow its trail halfway around the lake to where it finally enters and stays in the woods. On this day, the new snow has cleared the lake’s slate; the only tracks in evidence are yours and the otter’s. You’re glad to have shared the moment.