The eastern coyote, long associated with the trickster in Indigenous traditions, is a wonderful animal to track in snow. Its gait shifts with an almost unnecessary elegance, leaving behind a trail that is as beautiful as it is difficult to explain. -Chad
A walk in the forest interrupted by a sweet-pungent odour and pellets on the ground? Look up.
Porcupines can spend days in a good-tasting tree, which eventually makes the ground beneath it fairly informative. They will defend their favoured trees, from others of their kind, with aggressive growls but rarely is contact made. Their caves and dens can accumulate several feet of very distinctive dung that gets brushed with their tails along their paths.
In winter, the den becomes something of a city centre. Trails lead out from it like arteries, branching again toward the places where the porcupines are feeding. Follow enough of those trails and the forest begins to look less like a collection of trees and more like a small municipality with a surprisingly narrow menu. -Chad
The bandit of urban excess. Opposable thumbs and long toes have allowed the raccoon to adapt quite sufficiently to life around humans. The gait pattern is distinctive, giving even old tracks a recognizable identity.
In the woods, waterways are common foraging grounds. On warmer winter days, raccoons will sometimes leave their dens in search of food, and perhaps to stretch their legs. -Chad
What would the woods be without the white-tailed deer? Hunters have been studying their tracks, habits and signs for a very long time. There are still a few things the deer keeps to itself. One is that, with a practiced eye, the gait pattern can reveal the sex of the animal before you ever see it.
The browse tells another part of the story. Deer have no upper incisors, so they nip off buds and twigs between the lower incisors and the hard upper gum. The result is a somewhat ragged browse mark, quite different from the clean, chisel-like cuts left by hares and other small animals with those remarkably efficient front teeth.
The deer may be one of the first animals we learn to recognize in the woods. That does not mean there is nothing left to notice. -Chad
The snowshoe hare, along with most four leggeds, shows that the leading tracks tend to point to the right/left dominance of the individual animal. The tracking joke I tell is that if you come across a left-dominant hare while hunting, just move along to another trail–you will not outwit this one–noting that ~80% of mammals are right-dominant. -Chad
The long-tailed weasel is one of those animals that makes tracking entertaining. If you spend any time following tracks, you become familiar with this particular group of hunters, from the very small least weasel to the considerably larger fisher.
They have a distinctive gait, which is perhaps what one might expect from something built long and low to the ground. Each species leaves its own clues, but the stories those clues tell are rather more interesting than the tracks themselves. A weasel can chase a mouse through its own tunnels. A fisher can climb after a porcupine into the trees. It does keep its neighbors on guard! This individual is wearing its winter coat, complete with the telltale black tip on the tail. -Chad
