Out of Town
I’ll be down at the Oregon Dunes on a Tracking weekend Thursday through Sunday, so you won’t likely hear from me. Hopefully, I’ll have great stories and pictures upon my return. Here’s the link to the trip I’ll be on. I’m going along as the Teaching Assistant and Photographer for the trip. How lucky am I?!
In the meantime, here’s a picture of a track from two winters ago in Onalaska. Can you guess what kind of animal it is? Is this it’s front foot or back foot? Left or right? What was the temperature like when it stepped here, and has it warmed up or cooled down since then? Was this animal in a hurry? If you found this track, what sorts of other tracks and vegetation would you expect to find nearby?
September 26th, 2007 at 8:54 pm
A racoon. Right hind. It got colder after the track was left. I could only make loose guesses at other tracks and vegetation nearby since I don’t live in that country.
September 27th, 2007 at 7:31 am
Excellent! How can you tell it’s a right? And what makes you think it got colder? The picture was taken at about 8am, shortly after sunrise, what time do you think the track was left? What was the raccoon doing (just moseying through, stopping to look around, running from a dog, etc.)? Can you make a broad guess about why it would have been out at that time, doing whatever it is you think it’s doing? (That last question is related to the nearby (loosely defined) vegetation.)
October 1st, 2007 at 7:45 am
I guessed raccoon, but how do we know it’s a right foot and not a left? I guessed left because the distance between the right toe and the next one to it is greater than the distance between the left toe and the next one. When I look at my own hands and feet, the medial digit is farther from the others than the lateral one.
October 1st, 2007 at 9:40 pm
Great question Kathy. This is a tricky one, which I had to look up in order to be sure I had it correct. On a raccoon’s rear foot, the inner toe is slightly lower than the outer toe. They are all pretty equally spaced. So in this track, the raccoon was splaying its toes out in a funny way, but you can see that the leftmost toe is notably lower than the rightmost toe, making this a right foot. Also, I can’t find this right now to verify it, but I’m pretty sure that the shape of the heel pad is similar to the shape of our feet. See how the heel of the track registers deeper (all the way down to the grass is some spots) in an upside down J-shape? If you look at your own barefoot track, you will see that same J-shape from the ball of your foot down the outside edge.
October 2nd, 2007 at 6:32 am
That makes sense. Thank you.
October 2nd, 2007 at 7:18 am
I thought it was a right foot because of the toe on the left being lower then the toe on the right. I think it got colder because there are ice crystals in the print itself. I’m thinking it may have been in some very shallow water, or in some snow at the edge of some water where water seeped into the track after it was left, because of the ice crystals. I can’t tell how long the tracks may have been there without having an idea of the temperature - how fast the crystals would have formed. But if things were running as they *usually* do, I would say they had to have been left the evening or night before - before the temperature dropped during the night. I say evening or night mostly because racoons are mostly nocturnal, though, of course, not entirely. I’m going to guess it was feeding at the edge of some water - not running from a dog because the claws aren’t dug in as I would expect from speed. Am I anywhere close?
October 2nd, 2007 at 7:22 am
Oh, wait…..I think what I was taking for a particular kind of ice crystal is actually grass showing thru the print……OK, I’m going to stick to everything except standing in shallow water. I don’t think water seeped into the track because that is grass. But, I’m going with the rest.
October 2nd, 2007 at 12:42 pm
Mom, you are definitely in the ballpark. You are at a disadvantage because the climate is so different here. The raccoon was walking at its regular speed across my backyard. I know this partly from the print itself (like you said, the claws aren’t dug in), and also because I saw the full trail and know that the front right foot was registering right next to this rear left and that’s the regular walking pattern of a raccoon.
You were on the right track with trying to think “outside the track” to what you know about raccoons. What I was trying to get at, with the questions about nearby vegetation and such, is that raccoons are a lot more common near human habitation. This raccoon was walking across my backyard to check out the compost pile. It would also be a good guess that it was near water, that being a common habitat for them also.
Where you are at a disadvantage is that you might not think of two things that are really common here, but not where you are. This track was made in the evening, as you suspected. In the time between the track and the picture, it had warmed up and rained, then re-frozen. So you were on the right track with the water idea, but I think it’s just not real common for snow to melt and re-freeze in the middle of the night where you are, and it’s also not that common for it to rain there. I had also introduced the picture as being taken in the winter, so you might not think of winter being a time where the nighttime lows hover around freezing rather than that being the daytime high
While I can see that progression of thaw and freeze in the the track, I’m not sure that I would be able to see it if I didn’t already know it was there. I saw the track a couple hours before the picture was taken, and I know that the print hadn’t actually registered all the way down to the grass. The warm thaw melted the track down to the grass, and then it re-froze at that stage.
October 3rd, 2007 at 4:38 pm
OK, once I realized it was grass, I knew those couple of spots had melted but I was thinking it must have been from the sun in the morning just before you took it. But, I had this feeling that it had frozen over the thaw, but couldn’t explain it to myself! Now I understand. Tricky, tricky!