Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Who made these tracks? #2

Dan found these tracks last night on a dog walk at Delaney, leading up
and over one of the steep earthen dams. The animal followed a direct
course from open water on the outlet side of the dam, up the steep hill,
and then walked down the other side, directly into the water.

Sorry I didn't include anything for scale. These are large tracks, and
the second photo shows the animal descending the hill to water.

2 comments:

  1. I am going to guess beaver for this one, the first photo being the front foot (showing only three toes as is common).

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  2. Donna is correct - this is a beaver track. Another 100 yards from where the beaver entered the water is a beaver lodge, and I would frequently see a pair of beaver swimming around it at twilight. Back downstream I'd also see a pair of beaver swimming around the area between the earthen dam and the spillway, and I was never sure if this was the same pair. If it was, they were crossing over that dam, which seemed very exposed to me. (Or maybe they swim through the concrete pipe through the center of the dam!)

    If there was a pair that lived in the empoundment between the dam and spillway, there wasn't any sort of lodge or even a cache of food outside a bank burrow, from what I could find. So I assumed it was the same pair, but I could never figure out why they would be in one empoundment one night, and in the other one the next, and what route they were taking between the two. I'll keep monitoring the snow between the two waters to see if that's their preferred route.

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