January 22nd 2012 - SNOW

At long last, good snow for tracks. Over the past week there was first another snow into rain event Tuesday, with temps so warm by the end of the day that what snow there was turned into fog. Then a few dry cold days before an accumulating snowfall with subfreezing temps all day for Saturday. I visited the following morning. As I write this the temperature is heading back up again with rain in the forecast so most of what's seen below will be wiped out in all likelihood.

As I had feared, the batteries in the scout camera were tapped out and this meant whatever was on the memory card was lost. I should have replaced them on my last visit, but didn't have batteries with me at the time. Replaced the batteries and moved the camera about 20 feet from where I had it set up, now facing north instead of east. Part of my motivation was to get the camera facing more open terrain, and partly because there were fisher tracks on either side of where the camera had been located but not close enough to trigger it. The new location is closer to one of these sets of tracks, we'll see if the fisher returns to the same area.

Before even entering the woods the deer tracks were hard to miss:

These were on the edge of the parking lot

As expected, the woods were crisscrossed with deer tracks, although they were more random and spread out than I thought. One set had a hiker's footprints running alongside, as well as pawprints of the dog that was with the person checking out the deer tracks:

 deer in the middle, human on the left

x marks the Spot (or Fido)

I figured there would be impressions from where the deer had slept, i.e. deer beds. I found eight in total, five of them clustered together. All but one were in the low flat swampy area, relatively exposed compared to some of their other options nearby which was surprising. Since the snow is only a day old, I have to assume there are at least eight deer who slept here last night. 

 head at the bottom, urine stain in upper right

 note where rear legs made their impression, lower left

I also saw some tracks that I think are fisher, identified more by gait pattern than by any fine details of footprint, which were difficult to discern anyway:

EDIT: Dan Foster saw these and thinks they were left by something else, prints too small for a fisher. Perhaps a fox on the run. 

 camera is now set up near here

Finally, this mouse's track followed a meandering path and could be followed for a surprising length before disappearing under a tree trunk. Near-perfect snow conditions for capturing its tracks:

No ticks to speak of, one would hope they're hibernating under the snow pack. YTD total remains 19.