The friendly chatting of winter birds keeps me company and the sight of bluebirds in the stark landscape nourishes my color-starved eyes. Tracking a coyote’s tracks to a secluded pond in the woods feels like a little adventure. But once I’m out the door and into the landscape, nature offers me a few treats to keep me coming back. And the early March landscape is getting just a bit tiresome - too much brown and white out our windows. There’s all that layered clothing and boots and gloves and scarves. It takes a bit more effort to get out on a frosty morning. See? Wasn’t that a clever way to get to get some color into an early March blog, when everything is still brown, gray and white? I knew you’d appreciate it… Finding Delight in a Late Winter Walk They place their back feet inside the print of their front feet to use less energy and move directly where they want to go.Ī young Field Sparrow on Foxglove Beardtongue in Charles Ilsley Park’s Eastern Prairie. Being wild animals, coyotes want to use as little energy as necessary between meals, so they never run around in the snow like dogs do. I left the trail and headed diagonally across the field following a nice straight line of canine prints – and readers of my previous winter blogs probably know what that means – a Coyote! Coyotes ( Canis latrans) trot along at night making a straight trail of prints. A fun beginning to my search for animal tracks. As a former bookseller, I had to smile remembering Pooh and Piglet tracking a “heffalump” around a bush, which of course turned out to be their own footprints, too. I recognized them immediately, because one of them was mine! The last four birders on the Wednesday morning bird walk had trekked along chatting as we went back to our cars. Some pretty striking tracks greeted me in the center field of the park.Īs I started out one Thursday morning, I was presented with some pretty impressive tracks.
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