by Hal Borland
Chapter 8
An Assemblage of Animals
Everything that moves on this earth leaves its tracks somewhere. The countryman reads the messages written by his animal neighbors in dust or mud or snow. And sometimes, if he is patient, he gets to know them by becoming a part of the dawn, the dusk, or the night.
ANIMAL WATCHING IS MOSTLY a matter of tracks left in the dust, the mud, or the snow. Snow is the blank page on which you will find the tracks of most animals, though the prints themselves are often better in mud. After the Winter’s first snow I always go out to see what new neighbors I have and what the old, familiar ones have been up to.
Around the outbuildings there always are mouse tracks, the tracks of deer mice or white-foot mice. These little wild mice not only look much alike but their tracks are identical, fine, lacelike trails in which the individual footprints are only half an inch long. Sometimes you will find a central thread of a tail mark, since these little round-eared fellows have tails as long as their bodies. There will also be vole tracks. Voles, often called meadow mice, keep more to the open than the mice do. Their tracks are much like mouse tracks except that the footprints will overlap; mouse prints almost never do. And voles, with shorter tails, seldom leave tail marks.
To find mouse and vole tracks, look at exposed grass clumps and weed stems. Both mice and voles feed on grass seed and weed seed. A goldenrod stem may have a scattering of fine, dark chaff on the snow beneath it, proving that the mouse or vole has dined there. If the snow is more than an inch or so deep, the tracks may suddenly vanish, as though the track-maker had taken wing. Actually, the reverse is true. The mouse, or more often the vole, has gone under the snow, dug a tunnel, and filled it in behind him. Voles, and sometimes mice, make a whole labyrinth of passageways under the snow. When the snow melts you can see these runways, like a network on the ground. In the runways you may find an occasional tuft of grass or fine weed stems big as a child’s fist, marking a temporary bedroom or the remains of a Winter harvest.
Next most numerous, in my area at least, are the gray squirrels. Between my big barn, where the squirrels live, and the corn crib, where they feed all Winter, I am sure to find a maze of their tracks. Normally the gray squirrel travels by leaps, and in the snow you will find the footprints closely bunched. As with most leaping animals, the tracks of the hind feet are somewhat ahead of the forefeet; and as with most climbers, the toes will be splayed. The squirrel prints are much like those of the mice, but larger, the hind foot about two inches long, the forefoot less than an inch. If the snow is more than a few inches deep the prints will be in a kind of squinched hole with the bunched tracks at the bottom. But you will seldom find a tail mark. The squirrel carries its long tail high. When in a hurry, the gray squirrel may leap four or five feet at a time.
The tracks of the red squirrel are much like those of the gray squirrel but about one fourth smaller. And the red squirrel’s leaps are seldom more than three feet long. The flying squirrel’s tracks are almost identical with those of the red squirrel, but if you can find where the flying squirrel landed on its glide down from the nest-tree you will see the body mark as well as the footprints, and often the edge of the “wings,” or glide membranes, will show as parentheses connecting the fore and hind feet on each side. If you live in a fox-squirrel area you will find fox-squirrel tracks almost identical with those of the gray squirrels.
If it is the first snow of Winter or one late in the Spring you probably will find chipmunk tracks. This will be the Eastern chipmunk, if you live anywhere east of Nebraska. The chipmunk’s tracks are like those of the squirrels, but only about half the size of a red squirrel’s tracks. Chipmunks seldom venture far from a safe retreat, a den in an old stone wall for instance, when there is snow on the ground, and such forays are usually to gather weed seed or withered berries to supplement the Winter diet. In the North, chipmunks hibernate. In my area they seem to rouse from time to time, especially during warm spells, and come out of their dens for air. Still farther south they are out and active much of the Winter.
After taking a census of the mice, squirrels, and chipmunks, look for rabbits. You can find rabbit tracks almost anywhere, even in the edge of the city. I have seen cottontail tracks in New York City’s Central Park. Rabbits are almost as ubiquitous as mice.
Is there anyone who doesn’t know what a rabbit track looks like? There are those two prints of the hind feet, long ovals about four inches apart, and behind them a few inches are the almost round prints of the forefeet, usually with the left foot an inch or so behind the right one. Like all leapers, the rabbit overreaches his forefeet with his hind ones, making tracks that seem to point the wrong way.
Here in the Northeast we have two species of these small rabbits, the Eastern cottontail and the New England cottontail. Few casual observers, even few rabbit hunters, know them apart. The Eastern cottontail is grayish-brown, the New England cottontail reddish-brown. The Eastern is a trace the larger and has somewhat longer ears. But their tracks cannot be told apart. You will see the Eastern cottontail more often in daylight, since it feeds in early morning and late afternoon. The New England cottontail prefers to feed at night and usually lives in thicker cover. Most of the rabbits killed by automobiles on the roads at night, in my area at least, are the reddish-brown New England cottontails.
The rabbits usually have been all over my place. As I follow their tracks I see their whimsical approach to life, for they start here and go yonder, they nibble at a Brussels sprout stalk still standing in the vegetable garden, search for a carrot I missed in the Fall harvest, taste the frozen stems in the parsnip row. They wander through the flower garden, come to stare at the house, scuttle back to the pasture or to the warren they maintain under the big chicken house.
There are other rabbits here, the snowshoe rabbits or varying hares, but I have to go into the woods far up on the mountain to find their tracks. There aren’t many of them in my area, for I live on the southern fringe of their normal range, which doesn’t extend much below southern Massachusetts and central New York State.
Snowshoe rabbit tracks are arranged like those of the cottontail but they are considerably larger. The hare has big feet and they are generously furred. In a sense, this hare’s feet are snowshoes that enable him to travel on snow that would bury a cottontail to the ears. The snowshoe rabbit’s hind footprint may be six inches long and two inches across. Because it is so hairy, the print is fuzzy, not clear-cut. And the snowshoe, like all big hares, can leap a considerable distance, ten feet at a jump if he is in a hurry. For real leaps, though, the Western jack rabbit takes the prize. I have measured jack-rabbit leaps of close to twenty feet.
Next I look for the tracks of raccoons, and the most likely place to look is near water—a brook, a riverbank, or the shores of a pond. Coons like to wash their food before eating it, though they do not always do so, by any means.
A coon’s forefeet leave prints like those of a miniature human hand, complete with a long thumb. This print may be close to three inches long if the one who left it was a big buck coon. The tracks of the hind feet are like miniatures of a baby’s foot except that the toes are longer and thinner and the whole foot is long and slender. The hind foot may be four inches long. The coon walks like a dog, so the prints are staggered, forefeet in front, as they should be.
I expect to find coon tracks at the compost heap or at my dog’s food pan. Being full of curiosity, the coon probably will have made a circle of the house. If there is a garbage pail, he is sure to have investigated it, and unless the lid is tightly locked he probably will have taken it off, inspected the contents, maybe have scattered those contents all around. A coon is clever enough to open almost any garbage pail unless it has a special latch. The coon’s feet are so adept and the coon’s wits are so keen that it is often difficult to keep one in a cage with an ordinary fastening. Tame raccoons have even managed to open simple padlocks.
Quite possibly there has been an opossum among the nigh
t’s visitors. The ’possum’s forefeet leave prints like small human hands with the fingers and thumb widespread. The hind feet are shaped something like a monkey’s hand, with the thumb far back. At a glance, the ’possum’s feet would seem much better adapted for manual dexterity than those of a raccoon, but the fact is that the ’possum is one of the most inept and dim-witted of all animals and the raccoon is one of the most clever and adept. The individual prints of a ’possum’s feet are about two inches long, and they are in the same order, forefeet in front, as those of a coon. If a ’possum has been around he will have wandered almost as aimlessly as a cottontail, but he almost certainly will have visited the compost heap. ’Possums eat almost anything live or dead, animal, vegetable, or insect.
To my mind, the opossum has no business north of Virginia. But there are a good many of them here in New England and throughout most of the eastern half of the United States, even in Maine. The opossum is a kind of living fossil, a holdover from the remote past. It is the only marsupial we have in the United States. The gestation period is less than two weeks and the young are born as little more than fetal entities, so small that fifteen of them can be put in an ordinary tablespoon, smaller than honey bees. The mother helps these primitive babies into her abdominal pouch where each one attaches itself to a mammary teat. They remain there two or three months, then emerge and live with the mother the rest of the Summer and Fall. They are mature the following Spring.
Despite its warm coat, the ’possum is not really fit to live in a cold climate. Its ears often get frostbitten and sometimes its tail is so severely frozen that part of it sloughs off. This makes life even more difficult because the opossum uses its tail as a fifth foot in climbing.
Every Winter I see an occasional ’possum wandering about in the snow, seeming to resent the cold but not knowing what to do or where to go. For several Winters in a row I saw one, possibly the same one, in my road. It would sit in the snow at the roadside, holding up one naked, cold-red paw after another, its long, pink-tipped nose half frozen, its eyes watering, the picture of utter misery. Time after time I stopped the car and shooed this creature out of the road and into a clump of pines where it might find food and shelter. But each time it came back to the road, like a miserable beggar who didn’t know enough to go in out of the cold. Some ’possums take shelter in a hollow tree or a den someone else has made among the rocks and sleep out an especially cold spell, but this one had no such wise instincts. Finally it disappeared. Probably a fox came along and put it out of its misery.
There are porcupines in my woods, but I have never seen either the animal or its tracks near the house. Porcupines are also stupid beasts, but not quite as dim-witted as opossums. The porcupine’s tracks are rather fuzzy because the feet are very hairy. The feet are three inches or more long, and the prints of the hind feet overlap those of the front feet. The animal usually leaves a tail mark, a gently waving streak in the snow like the mark that might have been made by dragging a small pine bough. If the tracks are clear enough they will show four toes on the forefeet, five on the hind feet.
Porcupines live on buds, leaves, and other green stuff in Spring and Summer, but in the Winter they eat bark. They take up quarters in a grove of pines, poplars, maples, or other choice trees, climb part way up a big tree, chip off the outer bark, and settle down to eat the vital cambium layer. They girdle one tree after another and kill the tops. They are an expensive nuisance in the woods.
At best, porcupines are thorny propositions, though they never attack man or beast. They can’t really “shoot” their quills, but when they lash their tails they often fling a few loose quills several feet. Their chief defense is those bristling quills, which are needle-sharp, barbed, and most difficult to remove from the flesh. Any dog who has had a porcupine encounter needs help. My dog once had to have a vet remove thirty-two quills from his mouth. Wild cats have been found dead from the effect of porcupine quills. Wild cats sometimes kill porcupines, and occasionally a fox kills one. The fisher, a weasel-like animal which has now been virtually eliminated from most of our timberland, was once the most effective control for porcupines. Fortunately, porcupines reproduce slowly, bearing only one young at a time and only once a year.
I find foxes the most interesting animals of all to trail in the snow. The red fox is the most common in the Northeast, though the gray fox is a resident in all but the Plains States and the far Northwest. We have both species where I live and over much of New England. The red fox has a white tip to its tail and is a warm reddish-brown. The gray fox is salt-and-pepper gray and his tail is black-tipped. The tracks of the two are virtually identical. They look very much like the tracks of a large house cat. But if you find a particularly clear print you will see the mark of claws on a fox foot and no claws on a cat foot. Foxes have fixed claws, like a dog’s. A cat’s claws are retractable. Unlike a dog, a fox walks with one foot almost precisely behind another, so that the tracks make a straight line, not a twin line of staggered prints.
Foxes occasionally come down to my house, as they do to most country places. During the Fall and Winter we often hear them barking in the nearby pasture, and one night one barked directly under the windows of the sleeping porch. His tracks were there the next morning, showing that he had gone around the house, investigated the paths and outbuildings, visited the compost heap, then had returned to his hunting in the pasture. Sometimes I find where a fox has caught a field mouse, a meadow vole, or a cottontail. There may be the marks of a brief struggle by the rabbit, but where a mouse or vole has been killed there are only the marks of the fox’s pounce and a tiny drop or two of blood to prove the kill.
The most surprising fox escapade I ever followed out was at the railroad track which crosses my land. It is a stub line on which a short freight train is run every other day, so on odd days the snow lies untouched on the rails. One morning after a four-inch snowfall I found fox tracks between the rails and followed them for a few hundred yards. Then the fox, prankish as a small boy, climbed onto one rail and tried to walk it. The prints were clear as day on the rail, still covered with the pristine snow. Mr. Fox walked that rail about twenty yards, then lost his balance and fell off. He climbed back on and that time walked the rail close to a hundred yards before he fell off again. Once more he got back on, and that time he mastered the trick. He walked several hundred yards before he deliberately stepped off-no slip that time—and walked away, apparently satisfied with his skill and tired of the trick. Then I, of course, had to try it myself. I couldn’t walk that snow-clad rail more than fifteen yards before I lost my balance.
The skunk is another common night visitor to the country dooryard, nearly always the common striped skunk, since the Eastern spotted skunk, or polecat, is, despite its name, not common in the East. Its range is the South-Central part of the United States. The common skunk’s forefeet leave a print something like that of a very small dog, but the hind foot’s print resembles that of a miniature human foot about two and a half inches long. Claw marks are often visible on the forefoot prints, almost never visible on the hind foot prints.
The skunk is not quite as deliberate as the porcupine, but it is not accustomed to make way for anyone, man or beast. It eats a little of everything, insects, snakes, mice, birds, eggs, vegetable matter. It often raids compost heaps and garbage heaps, probably not so much for the waste food as for grubs and other vermin that live there. Skunks usually live in dens, often those abandoned by woodchucks or foxes, but occasionally they take up residence under farm buildings. I understand that a skunk can be discouraged from living in such quarters by liberally salting the place with moth balls; apparently skunks don’t like the odor. If left to their own devices, skunks are good citizens and helpful country neighbors. They eat great numbers of insects, grubs and such pests, as well as mice and other vermin. But they do insist on being treated with respect.
And there are the deer. Throughout the East, the South, and those parts of the Midwest that have deer, the only
species is the white-tail or Virginia deer. In the West there is the mule deer. The white-tail is tawny in Summer, bluish-gray in Winter, and the underside of its tail is pure white; in flight it lifts its tail and shows this dazzle of white. The mule deer has large ears, hence the name, and it doesn’t lift its tail, which is largely black, in flight. The mule deer is somewhat larger than the white-tail, and its Winter coat is brownish-gray. Moose and elk are related members of the family, but moose are found only in Canada and a limited area of Idaho and Montana, and elk, once common in the East, are now found only in a strip of the Rocky Mountains down through Canada into Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado. Most of us, if we see deer at all, will see only the white-tails.
Deer need woodland and brushy cover. They often come down to open fields and meadows at dusk and during the night to feed, but during daylit hours they almost always hide away in the woods. I find their tracks in my pastures after every snowfall, and in early Winter I find where they have been down to my apple trees for windfalls. Now and then in the Winter they visit my vegetable garden to see what can be salvaged there.
A deer’s hoofprints are much like those of a cow or sheep, the cloven hoofs leaving separate marks which together form a long oval. In any herd there will be does, fawns, and at least one big buck, so if a herd has visited me I will find tracks of various sizes. Those of the average doe are about three inches long at most, those of a fawn may be only half that big, and the biggest tracks of all will be those of a buck. Four-inch tracks would be those of a large buck. No matter what the size, the tracks of a doe tend to be broader in proportion to length than those of a buck. With sharp eyes, you may find deer tracks in a pasture after a rain. In my pastures the cows have trodden out a number of paths, and when I go out after a rainy night, even in Summer, I frequently find deer slots, as the tracks are called, in those muddy paths. And all Summer long I find deer droppings in the pasture, dark brown pellets something like rabbit droppings but elongated and half an inch long, twice as big as rabbit pellets. Game trails often thread the woods and many of them are used by deer. I find deer tracks in such trails in my woods in Summer dust, Autumn mud, and Winter snow. In Winter I nearly always find their tracks among the cedars and hemlocks. In places their browsing keeps the cedars trimmed to the trunk six or seven feet from the ground, as high as they can reach standing on their hind legs.
