What’s going on out on the land?
Eramosa River tracking journal, 2022.01.23
I left the house just before 8am so I could get out before too many people were out walking their Dogs. There ends up being a bit of a jumble in the trails when the Dogs come out and it’s just easier to spot everything without much distraction. I also feel a little weird sometimes, standing in the middle of a path, road or even the frozen river where everyone is walking by. If more folks stopped to ask about the tracks or even say hello it would feel less awkward, but usually they just stare, and then walk by cautiously while their Dog barks at me. Even the Dogs know there is something amiss about a person standing there noticing the world. I recount a bit of these feelings because it happened again this morning while I was checking a Grey Squirrel bounding trail along the road by my house.
What happened to this Gull?
I was walking up the frozen river with some kids in tow. We’d been out for a few hours tracking when we were on the last stretch and one of the kids pointed to a small mound on the ice. “Look a Penguin!” I think she’d meant it as a joke, but I took note and walked towards the mound. I had walked along this frozen river the day before and hadn’t noticed a mound on the middle of the river bulging out of the ice. I couldn’t tell what it was at first, but my guess was that a log or branch had broken through somehow. As I got close, I learned it was nothing of the sort.
In Search of Fisher Tracks, Tracking Journal, 2022.01.11
I was out on the ice real close to where I’d fallen through last year, looking for signs of a possible Fiser (Pekania pennanti) that my friend had said she may have seen a couple of hours before. She had told me about the possible Fisher earlier in the day when were were skating on the frozen river closer to my house. As soon as I was done with the skates, I put on my big boots and went upstream in search of this maybe Mustelid.