What’s going on out on the land?
White-tailed Deer feeding sign at Kinghurst
Recently, at a TCNA “tracker tuesday” call, there was a challenge proposed: on your next tracking outing, practice following the deer or the rabbits and see if you can find 10 plants which they fed on. For me in my area, the deer would be White-tailed Deer and the rabbits would be Eastern Cottontails. While I have been observing the Cottontails loosely at work with my students, for this tracking outing with the Earth Tracks Wildlife Tracking Apprenticeship, we focused on the White-tails.
Field Botanists of Ontario Trip Report for Main Tract Mushroom I.D. workshop
Pulling in to the parking area at Main Tract, the biggest of the tracts of the Dufferin County Forest (coming in at 607 hectares or 1,501 acres), my first thought was that I was way too early.
We were supposed to meet for 9:50am, and I was arriving early for 9:30. It was going to be my first outing with the FBO and I really wanted to arrive on time. Luckily I did arrive early as the parking lot was sandy which meant some good time looking for bird and invertibrate tracks while waiting for my fellow fungal nerds.