mammals – Page 7

Signs of holiday visitors

If you’ve noticed a slight sparseness to the posts here over the last week or so, it’s because I’ve been spending a lot of time on various holiday projects. For whatever reason, maybe because I’ve finally got a space where I can do so, I’ve decided to do a few home-made projects as Christmas gifts this year. Last weekend was my mom’s birthday (because it’s less than two weeks before Christmas, it kind of gets rolled in to the same gift-prep boat), which I made her a horse-head hat for. From there I’ve carried on to other gifts, and the poor sewing machine has barely had a rest. I’ll be doing some Christmas baking tomorrow, and then it’s off to get together with the family for a few days of holidays. My youngest sister took her holidays in the week preceding Christmas, rather than the week after – you really need that extra time to get everything done!

I’ve made a bit of time to take Raven out for her walk, which she really needs to get or otherwise we have a very restless dog pestering us to play ball in the evening. I buckle up the snowshoes and hike off back into our fields along the trails we’ve made, which are quickly becoming well-packed. The several inches of snow we received a couple of weeks ago has stuck around (and shows no signs of leaving now until March – it seemed like an unusually abrupt transition from November browns to winter whites this year). Raven has a blast tearing around in it, and I have to admit the landscape looks quite lovely, especially at dusk, with the setting sun casting an orange-pink glow on the western side of the snow hummocks, their eastern side shaded with pastel blues.

One of the neat things about snow cover is that it reveals the movements of the local wildlife, normally hidden from view during the warmer months. You get a chance to see what pathways are traversed by which animals; suddenly you’re aware of rabbit highways and squirrel burrows and the foraging routes of mice. Deer make especially large and noticeable tracks, and when out a few days ago I discovered a set of them leading out of the woods and down to our now-frozen pond, using the trail that Dan and I had packed down with the snowshoes. The next day I found some more – many also following our snowshoe paths – heading into the cedar groves at the back of the fields. In the summer, would we be aware of these beautiful creatures following silently in our steps? But in the winter we can have a small peek into their world.

There seemed to be three sizes of deer tracks following our trails; a rather large set, at slightly smaller set, and a quite petite set. I really hope that at least one of them happens to be young Joe Buck, who I haven’t seen since before hunting season when he happened to wander by while Raven was outside and she chased him off the property. The little tracks are so tiny my first thought would have been doe with fawn, except it’s quite the wrong season for dependent fawns. The mating season usually occurs around the end of November.

It’s interesting how variable deer tracks are. Their hooves are actually two separate pieces on the ends of toe-like digits, rather than the single hoof of horses. The separate toes given them greater traction and the ability of the toes to separate also creates a broader surface area in softer substrates.

I like that in this one you can see the dew claws (why they’re still called claws in ungulates who don’t really have claw-like nails, I don’t know), which belong to reduced toes and don’t serve much function (though in soft conditions, such as here, or in wet mud, they may touch the ground and could potentially help with grip, I suppose).

Raven checks out the tracks as they head back into the forest. I haven’t seen any deer around here in many weeks, but clearly they’re about, and just staying well back of the house and its crazy black dog. It’s nice to know they’re here still, even if they never come say hello.

Tay Meadows Tidbit – tiny bones

About a week ago, before we got all that snow (as you can see from the photos), I was hunting for a ball I’d thrown for Raven that had disappeared into the woods and she seemed unable to find. I circled wider and wider, completely puzzled about what happened to the ball (it took a funny bounce, it later turned out, and ended up on the other side of the driveway yards away from where we were looking). Eventually my circles brought me to a track in the forest, barely more than a tree-less gap, that ran between the natural forest and the artificially-planted pines at the foot of the drive.

Out in the middle of this, I spotted some poop. It looked like hawk or owl poop. I remember reading on Julie Zickefoose’s blog some time ago about the difference between hawk and owl poops, in that one (I think owl) drops it straight down from their perch, while the other (hawk) expels it at an angle. The first ends up as a blob on the leaf litter, while the latter results in more of a streak. These ones looked definitely blob-ish, so I suspect owl, and a good-sized one at that given the amount of poop. Perhaps the Great Horned that we’ve heard from time to time and whose pellet Dan found under the maple in the front yard.

Looking closer, I noticed there was a pile of bones beside the poop. They were completely cleaned off. I couldn’t tell how long they (or the poop) had been there – possibly even since that first pellet was found in early October. Although we tend to think of bird poop washing away quickly, if it had been a dry spell, the poop might have hardened making it harder to wash off the leaves. My suspicion is that these bones used to be in a pellet, but that rain that we’ve had since (and quite a bit of it at times in November) combined with the work of scavenging beetles and other invertebrates, have decomposed and washed away the hair that used to be matted up with it.

I can’t tell what they used to belong to. Most of the bones were broken or fragmented, and the only skull bone I could pick out was a portion of a lower jaw bone, below. I didn’t think owls broke the bones when they were digesting their prey and forming the pellet, and I briefly toyed with the idea that this might be a snake poop, but aside from the broken bones there was nothing else to conclusively support that. I saw a few vertebrae in the pile, but the rest were generic long bones, or at least looked that way. The jaw bone was tiny, and quite long relative to its size. Shrew, perhaps?

Sunday Snapshots: Raven on thin ice

We’ve had a string of below-freezing nights and cool days that have frozen over our standing water. At lunchtime today Raven and I walked back to our little pond. I was surprised to find, by breaking the ice at the edge, that it was already frozen to nearly a 3/4″ (2cm) thickness. It wouldn’t support my weight, but it seemed thick enough to hold Raven up. I kept expecting the ice to crack and for her to fall in, but she never did (I wouldn’t have been worried; it’s less than a foot deep, and she’s a water dog). It sang as she walked about on it and tugged on weeds and branches frozen into its surface, though, a high twittering like a flock of little birds. I took 140+ photos – but I’ll limit it to 18 here…

Raven and frozen pond — Really want that stick...

Tay Meadow Tidbit – mammal scat

We all know the reasons to stay on the trail: mostly to protect the vegetation and other things from the disturbance and damage of many feet walking over them. Perhaps also to avoid getting lost, or because trails generally have safer footing. In public places such as parks or conservation areas, this totally makes sense. But on private property, you can probably get away with hiking around off-trail, cutting through the bush, across an open field, along the edge of a pond or creek. Since it’s just your feet (or a small number of people, anyway, compared to public spaces), and you’re in a known area, there is less likelihood of any of the reasons to stay on the trail happening.

And there is one really good reason for the naturalist to stray off-trail: you’ll see more. On trail you’re limited to perhaps a few yards in either direction in terms of what you can reasonably observe. Anything further out than that you’re likely to walk right by without ever knowing it was there. On the trail you end up taking the same path time and again, and everything becomes familiar. You don’t have to watch where you’re placing your feet (or not as much) so you don’t spend as much time looking at the ground. Off-trail everything is new and you have to keep an eye on your surroundings. There’s the potential to encounter anything.

This afternoon I decided to cut across one of the fields in a transect that still took me roughly from point A to point B but through the grasses off-trail. I happened to cross a mossy bit of exposed rock. In this middle of the rock was this old piece of poop. Most animals don’t poop on trails, so you’re unlikely to encounter scat unless you happen to be venturing about off-trail.

My best guess on this is that it’s fox scat, but it’s started to decompose a little and it’s hard to discern shape now, one of the most useful clues for narrowing down the poopetrator. The candidates here for a tubular scat would most likely be fox, raccoon or skunk. I found a Google Book excerpt from A field guide to mammal tracking in western America by James C. Halfpenny, Elizabeth Biesiot, which provided some information on “scatology”. Canines, including foxes, usually have a blunt end and a tapered end to their scat. Raccoons tend to be blunt on both ends, and skunks tapered at both ends. It kind of looks like the end to the right might have been tapered, but hard to say.

Another clue to the animal is often the contents of the scat, if you can pick out some of the bits of the animal’s diet. One of the things that made this bit of scat noteworthy to me was all the bits of grasshopper visible in it, and specifically the thick “thighs” of the insects. In addition to the condition of the scat, the abundance of grasshopper material would suggest to me that the pile was probably from October or possibly early November, when the meadow was thick with the bugs and they’d make a really easy meal.

The mammal tracking book result suggested that dog scat often has large items such as bits of exoskeleton from insects in the scat, specifically mentioning grasshopper legs as a common item. That doesn’t necessarily rule out raccoons, however, as the latter are omnivorous and exoskeletons would probably pass through the digestive system of most predators. Skunks will also eat insects regularly. Really, with the incredible abundance of grasshoppers that were about in our meadow in the fall, I can’t see any opportunistic animal passing them up.

A final clue can sometimes be the number of scat piles in an area. Some mammals will return to the same area (called a latrine) repeatedly to poop. Raccoons and skunks are among these. There was just the one scat that I noticed, which may therefore also favour fox as the primary candidate, but doesn’t rule the others out – when you gotta go, you gotta go.

Raven might also have been a possibility, but I don’t think grasshoppers would have figured so heavily in her scat, even if she was catching a few.

Tay Meadows Tidbit – Porcupine tree damage

Well, that whole orchid kick got a little away with me. I hadn’t really intended to turn it into four posts when I found the helleborine stalks in the woods. And I cut myself short: I’m sure I could have rambled for a week on the subject if I’d wanted to. But I’m moving on now, to other things I’ve seen recently. On the same outing as I found the helleborines, I came across this tree trunk that had been gnawed away at by something. As I was stepping back to take a photo, Raven came over to check it out. She’s never one to pass up a photo op, whether invited or not. It does give you a sense of scale (she’s a 45lb dog). The damage extended about two feet (60cm) up the tree. It’s the work of a porcupine, which switch to bark as a primary staple in the colder winter months, when there aren’t green foods available.

The tree itself is a beech, so told by the smoothish gray bark, and it’s an oldish one. Judging from the diameter I’d guess it to be 60-80 years. It stands along an old fenceline, presumably the original fences from when the land used to be clear, and the forest has grown in around it again. I’ve noticed a few such trees in the forest. Damage like this on a smaller, younger tree might kill it, but this mature individual will likely just seal over the wound and keep on truckin’. Just like when you’re feeling stressed out, though, it will weaken the tree while it pulls through and make it more susceptible to diseases or other stressors such as caterpillar outbreaks.

It’s interesting to note that there are two colours to the damaged area. The upper part, a small band across the top, is a lighter, brighter colour than the lower part. This suggests that the damage was done in two stages: the lower part was the porcupine’s first visit, and then it came back a day or two later, after the first part had already started to dry out, and chewed off a bit more.

The porcupine would have chewed off the outer bark, which is tough and not very nutritionally useful, to get to the softer inner bark. The inner bark also contains some of the tree’s network of food transport tubes, called xylem and phloem, which like our veins move nutrients and oxygen throughout our body, contained within our blood. The outer bark acts like the tree’s skin, protecting the inner tissue. The damage exacted here by the porcupine is not dissimilar to if we fell and scraped our knee. The skin is peeled back to expose the soft tissue underneath, which then bleeds because the network of blood vessels has been torn. Before the tubes “clot” shut, some sap is lost, making the wound feel tacky, just like a scraped knee would be as it clots. It was a moderately warm day out, by mid-November standards, and a few flies had been attracted to the sweet sap on the recently-damaged part.