The difference in weather in one week here in western North Carolina has been extraordinary! We went from temperatures in the teens to temps close to 70 degrees! So when I chose this puzzler with animal tracks in snow, it seemed totally relevant. What’s the weather been like where you are living? Have you had a dose of winter yet? Been outside in the snow to follow animal tracks?
Did you recognize the tracks from last week’s puzzler as those from a gray squirrel? Of course not knowing the size made it hard to determine the kind of squirrel but if you guessed squirrel that was close enough! Without measurements or anything to give a sense of scale, it would have been difficult to pin it down. Knowing what squirrels live by you is a first step to identification.
Gray squirrels, and other squirrels, have these kind-of hopping tracks where their front feet actually land behind their back feet, making these boxes that are slightly wider in front than in back. Gray squirrel tracks and sometimes confused with rabbit tracks. Here is a photo of rabbit tracks. Notice the difference. As you can see, in the rabbit tracks the two back marks are not side by side, but rather one behind the other.
A great book about tracks that I highly recommend if this is an area that interests you is called Tracking and the Art of Seeing: How to Read Animal Tracks and Sign, by Paul Rezendes. In his chapter about gray squirrels, he says, “When the squirrel moves quickly, its smaller front feet land first, then the larger hind feet pass to the outside and around the front feet to land in front of them.” He goes on to talk about red squirrels, flying squirrels, shrews, mice and chipmunks that can leave similar patterns in their tracks but that the key to identification then is the size and distance between feet in the tracks. The hind track width of a gray squirrel is 1 1/8th inches to 1 1/2 inches whereas a red squirrel will be much smaller at 7/8th-1 1/8th inches and a flying squirrel has a width of up to 3/4 inches.
I hope your weekend is a wonderful one, filled with quality time outside enjoying nature. Our next puzzler features an animal that has been working hard everyday to convince the world that spring has indeed arrived. It’s a video puzzler–you can check it out here!