What’s going on out on the land?
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.
Tracking Journal 2021.11.27
We had just finished part of our climb up Old Baldy, maybe a quarter of the way to the top, just finished checking out some pretty clear mouse tracks, bounding across our trail when we all sort of slowed and stopped. We knew something was a little different about the tracks, but it took a second to register. There were pretty clear, though not as crisp as some of the others we had seen. Perhaps that may have indicated some sense of age… Perhaps the air was cooler when the animal came through and the snow was a little more powdery? Perhaps the animal had come through during the evening the day before or maybe during night?