What’s going on out on the land?
Determining Direction of Travel on a Fisher Trail
“Which way them critters goin’?”
To this day it can be tricky to tell the direction of travel through deep snow.
For this exploration in determining the direction of travel I’ll use a snowed in Fisher trail we encountered during an Earth Tracks Tracking Apprenticeship outing at Bognor Marsh, near Meaford, Ontario as an example. It was a faint trail, mostly snowed in, but the impressions were visible at the right angles, as long as they hadn’t been blown away in the wind.
Trailing a Fisher at Old Baldy
We had just crossed over from the thick White Cedar forest into a little more spacious deciduous forest, when, in a very unassuming tone, a friend called us over to check out some tracks. I don’t know if he realized at first how cool the trail he had just found was, but as we stepped off of the path and looked down at the tracks everyone leaned in a little closer, and our voices started to ring with a little more excitement. Our colleague had found a Fisher trail.
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.