Last winter for the first time, on one of my walks around the rim of Birch Lake, I saw otter tracks in the
snow. I wasn’t certain that’s what I had seen until I did a little research –
which also told me I wasn’t rightly interpreting what I had seen.
Along the frozen shore of your lake is a great place to look
for otter tracks, especially before the snow gets too deep. Otters (technically
river otters, scientific name Lontra canadensis) come out of their
winter burrows, usually near water, to forage for food.
The tracks I saw had paw-print trails interrupted by long,
slender depressions in the snow. I assumed those depressions were made by the
otter’s belly dragging. That wasn’t quite accurate. Actually, according to an
article from Wisconsin
Natural Resources magazine, otters “conserve energy moving across the
snow by taking a few bounds and then sliding on their tummies. From above,
these tracks look a bit like Morse code, in a dot, dot, dash pattern.” Otters
can travel quite fast, about 15 to 18 miles per hour, faster than most people
can run.
So knowing what I do now, I am even a little more inclined
to be anthropomorphic about otters and say: Here’s an animal that knows how to
enjoy life.
I followed the trail of last winter’s otter until I came to
a hole in the ice up against a mucky shoreline interlaced with tree roots, near
our lake’s outlet to a creek. I had followed him (or her) home. Go down to your
lake soon and see if you can’t find an otter’s trail to follow across the snow.
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