jim.htm

Where you find tracks is just as interesting as who made them, and is a critical part of identifying and interpreting them. What fascinating stories emerge!

One winter weekend, my wife and I were cross country skiing in Sequoia National Forest at an elevation of 6,500 feet. The snow pack was about three feet deep. At dinner that night, some snowshoers excitedly told us that they had seen mountain lion tracks on an unplowed road going farther into the Sierras.

I wondered what a mountain lion would be doing 2,000 feet above its primary food in the middle of winter, but we kept our skepticism to ourselves and asked for some more details. The observers said: “This mountain lion was going along the middle of a public snowshoe/ski trail, and it kept going up on the snowbanks on either side, down to the middle and up again… Oh, and there were two of them… Oh, and we think they were chasing a rabbit or something!”

Hmm. Sounded like a domestic dog to me. However, we decided to ski out there the following day and look for the alleged cat’s tracks. Sure enough, one track among dozens resembled a cougar’s but the others were definitely dog-like. Plus, the animal’s tracks eventually veered off along with a skier’s trail. Plus, the tracks had been made between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. when the snow was soft enough to hold impressions — meaning that this “mountain lion” had to travel in midday on a public trail!

We communicated to the snow-shoers our verdict that the tracks were left by a domestic dog, and thereafter vowed to advocate for common sense as well as knowledge of animal behavior when we teach track ID. Here is a reality check. If an adult cougar needs to kill the equivalent of one deer a week, how could it survive where there are none? How could it even subsist on snowshoe hares or white-tailed jackrabbits if it is not adapted (like the lynx) to hunt in deep snow? Even if a cougar were dispersing to a new territory, why would it head farther into the high country? And, why would it waste energy running up and down snowbanks?

A while later, I came across another example to illustrate this point. Photo 1 shows a domestic dog track that does resemble a mountain lion’s. The location was a public open space area on the south edge of San Francisco Bay. Photo 2. I never dismiss a possibility outright, because I also know that animals can do remarkable things. Cougars are known to have dispersed as far as 300 miles from their birth location, and a radio-collared female gray wolf was found 450 miles from her pack! And, beavers are known occasionally to travel far away from water to find new habitat.

So, when I see tracks where they “should not” be, I look at the landscape and ask myself where travel corridors might be, where the animal might hide or hunt or forage given its biology. If Photo 1’s track had been made by a cougar, it would almost certainly be an escaped illegal pet — but stranger sightings have occurred!

This domestic dog sighting also reminded me that trackers must know how to distinguish between what is farfetched and what can merely fit into an animal’s biology and behavior. An example is Photo 3, a muskrat trail at the Klamath National Wildlife Refuge in northern California. I had been looking for muskrat tracks to photograph, driving on the dirt roads that separated sections of the wetland that were agricultural fields, lakes, and other open space.

Muskrats prefer shallow water (30 inches deep or less) so that their houses do not get swamped by waves and flooding. More importantly, they need food in the form of abundant aquatic or shoreline vegetation (like cattails and tule reeds) near their homes. The habitat where I was driving was bad for muskrat shelters (the water being too deep and unprotected), and there was virtually no plant life for food.

Nonetheless, on a hunch I stopped and went down a slope to an agricultural drainage ditch. There I found perfect muskrat tracks where they “should not” be. Why were they there? The only explanation was that a juvenile muskrat was out exploring for new territory, which is within muskrat biology. In fact, the tracks went up onto shore and right back down again.

Another example of wide-ranging exploration is shown in Photos 4 and 5. A bighorn sheep left its tracks going across a dry lake bed in California’s East Mojave Desert. Far away from protected habitat, this lone sheep made a six mile crossing to the mountains on the other side. Such a long dangerous crossing is unusual, but bighorns have been known to move that far between mountain ranges. Ewes with young normally move shorter distances; Photo 4’s tracks were probably made by a ram at least three years old, because that is when juvenile rams generally begin to leave their bachelor herds.

The presence of tracks and signs in odd places will help us understand animals’ feeding habits and their survival strategies also. Last June, I explored an area of Los Padres National Forest that had burned in a huge fire nine months earlier. Photo 6. I am always interested to see when wildlife begins moving back. I thought I might see some deer tracks because new vegetation had come up. On the other hand, the area I explored was at least two and a half miles from the nearest good deer cover.

What I did not expect was the predominance of doe and fawn tracks on steep trails going up a ridge where only charred oaks and pines remained, with no cover and little food. Not only that, when I scrambled up these steep trails for an answer, I found five or more deer lays completely in the open on top of the ridge, including those of adult deer and fawns! Photo 7 shows a deer lay in the foreground.

Down below the ridge, some buckwheat and Agoseris had been browsed (Photos 8 and 9), but why the beds on top of the ridge? Well, danger from the deer’s principal predator, the mountain lion, would be close to zero because cougars require cover for their ambush hunting too, being able to catch deer only from short sprints. Coyotes could take a fawn, but their approach could be seen, smelled, or heard from quite a distance on that ridge. When I returned a week later, there were no fresh deer tracks or lays, so it appeared that I had stumbled across the tracks of a group of deer temporarily using this burn area to their advantage.

I also noticed that forest fires open up travel routes for animals dispersing or seeking mates so that they may take the most direct routes to new areas. A bear had also left tracks going up the same ridge where the deer lays were, with no food visible as far as the eye could see.