LETTER FROM BOBOLINK FARM
SIGNS OF LIFE
By Barbara Tatham Johnson
Snow fell steadily all night covering the countryside with over a foot of
dry fluff. The initial heaviest accumulation was polished by strong wind. A
lighter snowfall before dawn left a thin topping that resembled Ivory soap
flakes. At daybreak the sun shone. We had perfect conditions to track
animals.
When the porches and walkways are cleared, the driveway plowed, the bird
feeders refilled, and seed scattered on a cleared area of ground, we strap
on our snowshoes and take a walk. Fresh snow brings excitement.
A glint of blue, a blue hard to describe and particular to deep snow and
glaciers, a turquoise quintessence, escapes from snowflake prisms as each
footfall breaks deep into the white surface. We step deliberately and enjoy
each flash of color.
We turn from the meadow edge and enter an opening in the woods where we soon
find a trail of crosslike prints, each directly in line with the preceding
one, that marks where a partridge, or ruffed grouse, promenaded in the
center of the frozen brook. We follow the tracks to neat wedges of wing tip
prints where the bird took flight. Another partridge has spent the night in
snow piled against brush. A line of crosses leads from the exit into a
hemlock thicket.
We find snowshoe hare prints that have a petal-like appearance where the
rear paws splayed on the bound, crisscrossing and circling the trail. The
hares have been feeding among the branches of poplar tipped over by the
weight of snow, and the place has the look of a feed yard. “That must be
poor country indeed that does not support a hare,” Thoreau wrote.
A fox’s tracks, at times narrow holes where the snow was too soft to hold
her weight, form an almost straight line into the brush from the frozen bog
to a well-used hare trail. When the fox makes another pass here this
evening, she will use our snowshoe tracks to ease her way. We wonder if she
will den in the burrow at the base of a big hemlock where our south boundary
line meets a neighbor’s. A skunk occupied the burrow last year and may
continue to claim residence.
The distinctive trail of a marten or a fisher shows up nearby and leads away
from the direction of the burrow. The duel side by side impressions of
overlapping front and back feet with a spacing of almost a meter between
tracks is the sign of a marten or a fisher. We are not always sure. Olaus
Murie, the author of The Peterson Guide To Animal Tracks, wrote of
the confusion he sometimes experienced because the stride of a large male
marten can measure the same distance as that of a female fisher, and both
species can move at well over a meter a bound. We know trappers caught
fishers in these woods before we bought the place over fifteen years ago. A
huge beech snag near the bog housed a fisher family for several years before
it collapsed from age. We think these tracks are those of a fisher and turn
our trail to follow them. The prints wander and loop and lead away into a
hemlock thicket where we cannot follow easily on snowshoes.
We stop to rest and recall an incident in February several years back when
we took a walk in the snowy woods and came upon the trail of a large animal.
We saw where the animal, approaching us and sensing our presence, stopped,
and, turning in his tracks, hurried away in the direction he had come. We
were not far behind and decided to follow, perhaps to catch sight of the
otter, for this is what we decided was the maker of the distinctive trail of
bounds and long slides. Thaws had lowered the snow depth, and we wore boots
that gave us more mobility. We hurried off in pursuit, skirting around a
brushy thicket where the otter track led, and joined the trail where it
crossed the stream, noting that the animal had explored a hole in the ice
during his earlier approach. We saw the tracks keeping to the middle of the
snow-covered stream. The otter was moving away fast. Footing was slippery.
We struggled to keep close. The otter moved off through the woods jumping
across drifts, his narrow body dragging a grove. We noticed the impressions
under hemlocks where deer bedded until the fleeing otter disturbed them.
Fresh deer tracks headed south deeper into the woods. Now we crossed a
neighbor’s woodlot. The otter headed toward a woods road packed hard by
snowmobile use. Gasping for breath, we emerged onto solid footing and peered
far ahead in hopes of a glimpse of the animal. Immediately, we realized we
had no chance of catching up when we saw the clear footprints in the loose
snow beside the machine tracks where the otter ran four paces and slid on
his belly at least nine feet along the smooth trail. We caught our breath
and continued along the tracks until we saw where the otter crossed the
paved road and went over acres of snow-covered horse pasture to the woods
beyond. We laughed at ourselves for presuming to keep up with such a
speedster and, feeling very tired, walked home on the road.
“In what bold relief stand out the lives of all walkers of the snow! The
snow is a great telltale, and blabs as effectually as it obliterates. I go
into the woods, and know all that has happened. I cross the fields, and if
only a mouse has visited his neighbor the fact is chronicled,” wrote John
Burroughs in Winter Sunshine.
The sense of sport in tracking appeals to us. Reading in the tracks the
story of animal lives rewards our desire to know what our woodland neighbors
are doing. We discover moments of drama displayed in racing fox prints atop
the zigzag of hare tracks or, at the meadow edge, the deep blood-speckled
impression in snow of owl body and wing tips surrounded by the scattered
feathers of a partridge. Along the roadside a crow’s tracks reveal his
hopeful examination of a bright red, discarded, French fried potato
cardboard holder. The traces of life and death remind us of life’s basics. A
track is a visible remnant of the passage of a presence, evidence of the
touch of life, a piece of life’s puzzle.
