Another Backyard Hike

Our weather service is predicting daily highs above the freezing mark for the next 7 days, so I took advantage of one of our last cold days yesterday to take a hike in the backyard and photograph some tracks in the snow before they disappear with the melting snow.

Do any of you have crows visiting your backyard feeders? The crows in our backyard spend quite a bit of time just walking around looking for tasty morsels on the ground. I think their footprints are really neat.

Here are some nice cottontail footprints. Usually I never see their back toes spread out like this.

Here are the footprints from a cat that's been hanging around our yard all winter. I am not happy about this and have found some evidence of birds this cat has killed.

On Tuesday night, when I went to put Sophie out around 11 PM, I turned on the backyard light and got to see a fox eating birdseed from the ground feeder tray. Unfortunately, both of the spotlights needed to be recharged, so I couldn't get a really good look at it, but I did find a whole bunch of fox footprints in the backyard. Here are just a couple.

The deer were back one of those warm nights last weekend too. That was the first time they had been here since the weather got really cold. Mr. Johnson saw quite a few deer tracks up the street where the woods provide more shelter for the deer. (I think one of the neighbors up there feeds them too.) Even if you didn't recognize the deer hoofprints, the "scatological" evidence gives them away!

I found something else interesting in an area of the yard I don't often visit in winter. Last fall I raked up some leaves and put them in bags for use on my gardens in the spring. I put the bags down along the edge of my aspen grove and figured they could just get covered with snow and then in the spring the leaves would be mostly decomposed and I could just dump them on the garden. After finding this yesterday, I realized that won't be working out for me this spring.

Here's where several of the leaf bags were buried. You can see that almost all of the bags have been torn open and there are leaves all over the place. It looks like the fox was there and dug down into the snow--one of the bags was actually dug completely out of the snow and the other one (by the fox tracks) was apparently torn open by the fox digging into it. I suppose mice and voles have no problem chewing through the plastic bags and finding nice warm leaf insulation to burrow into. I can't figure out what else it would be, but needless to say, I don't think I'm going to have much leaf compost to put on the garden this spring.

Here's where a bunch of bunny trails converge and head over into the neighbor's backyard. The bunnies love hiding under these nice, thick evergreen trees. Just to the left of the trees in this picture, the neighbor also has a small utility shed and I think the possum is living underneath there (along with all sorts of other critters -- judging by the number of tracks leading to that shed).

Sophie accompanied me on this backyard hike. There are so many good smells for a dog out in the backyard. In this picture, it looks like Sophie is "pointing." I think I just caught her in mid-stride, but you can certainly see the intensity and concentration as she's tracking through the snow. This is the acre of backyard that I've discontinued mowing, so I'm sure there are all sorts of wild scents here.

Here's another picture of Sophie--whatever she scented here was extremely interesting. I find it fascinating that dogs have such an amazing sense of smell. It's really fun to watch a scent hound at work.

Well, I hope you all enjoyed this little backyard hike from the warm comfort of your home and I'm glad you were able to come along with Sophie and me.