Here comes Peter Cottontail

Here are some pics by JB


It's always a good sign when the start grooming. It means they are relaxed and you can get closer.

Taking Pictures

Hi Scouts. This is JB's sister. RB. I wanted to show you some things about pictures. If you have good camera that zooms well, it is easy to take pictures from a long way away. My dad found a rabbit and tried to take a picture. This is what he got

Pretty lousy. The problem is that if you zoom a lot it is hard to hold the camera steady enough. Resting the camera on something, like a branch or a table is good. Even better is a tripod, like this.
Using the tripod I got this picture.

Much better, yes? This one is better still, since we zoomed out a bit, which made it easier for the camera to auto-focus.

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Upwind vs. Downwind

We talked some about the importance of approaching animals from downwind, so they can't smell you. It's hard for us to understand this, since we can't smell as well as animals. JB learned about upwind and downwind today by 'tracking' an animal that anyone can smell.


They have to be alive to count for a picture, so this does not count. JB almost got a picture of one of these while waiting for the bus a couple days ago. Still not sure what it is? (you can see from the highway line above that it is pretty big.)

Now I bet you know what it is. The interesting thing is that we walked up to it from downwind. Even though there was almost no wind at all, we could smell it from at least 50 yards away. Once we got past it the smell ended in about a yard, since the wind was carrying the smell away from us. When you are trying to get close to a live animal it is important to be downwind, so the animal's scent is being blown towards you (even if you can't smell it) rather than your scent being blown towards them. (They can smell it.)



JB demonstrated his tracking skills by getting closer to these animals

Can't see them? Well, these do not have the best sense of smell, but they do have sharp eyes.

JB walked slowly, and paused a lot, and managed to get pretty close to these animals, which are larger than a groundhog. It helped that he had his sister's camera, which zooms pretty well. Awesome work by JB.

A Large Animal, A Small Animal and a Robin--Signs of Spring

On a walk through the neighborhood, SC spotted this deer eating some tulip leaves. He was obviously not concerned with us though he did see us. He leapt to the left along the house and went over the hill.

These photos show a squirrel in a tree. We watched him and 4 of his closest friends/brothers hop out of the nest in the second photo. They were playing and enjoying the change of seasons.


These three photos show deer tracks (lots of them!) going along the perimeter of the old part of St. Bernard's cemetery. The deer seemed to travel together walking slowly along a tree line to White's Run for a cool drink. SC was able to get two plaster casts of deer tracks here.

These two photos were taken last week as the snow was beginning to melt. They show tracks through the woods around our neighborhood. The animal was following a path through some brush walking slowly.
Here is a photo of out cat tracking a bird.

This photo from SC shows a robin eating holly berries after a snowstorm. Soon robins will nest in the same tree.

Snowy Photos

Here are some photos from SC. These shots were taken in February when we had a lot of snow. They show Junco bird tracks hopping outside the kitchen window near a bird feeder. The birds weren't moving fast and staying close to the feeder. The second and third photos show cat paw prints of one of our cats who loves to go outside and track birds herself. She was walking around the house investigating the bird feeders. She walks slowly and methodically, keeping low and quiet. The fourth photo is of a female cardinal and the last shot shows a black-capped ckickadee.

At the watering hole

Wouldn't it be great if we were Tanzanian Boy Scouts, and instead of earning Tracking merit badge by trying to track squirrels in your backyard you could head out to some watering hole on the Serengeti and track lions or wildebeests or whatever?
Well, actually we do have things like that. We don't have warthogs or giant sloths or other cool animals like that. We do have animals, however, and since they tend to avoid us (given our tendency to shoot them) tracking is the best way of finding out about them and what they do. It is especially easy to find tracks around a watering hole in winter.

This is a picture JB's dad took out at Blue Spruce today, 3/7. This is on top of the reservoir, and you can see lots of tracks, mostly of deer. They are all headed to the right side of the picture, which is where the dam is. There is open water there all winter, so the deer apparently come here to drink.



To the right are some deer tracks. These are old and deep, so they were made a while ago. You could almost make a plaster cast of these. Note that JB's dad went out on the ice to get these pictures. This is, as JB's mom said, "Really stupid." Don't go out on a frozen lake without adult supervision.



These are more recent deer tracks. The snow was more frozen, so it did not sink in so much. Snow is a great way to see how different conditions create different sorts of tracks.


These are goose tracks, both old and new. Well, I guess it's a goose. They are clearly bird tracks, both because of the three toes and because it roams around a lot. (Deer tend to go pretty straight.) It's not a crow, and it's not an eagle, so a goose seems a good bet. More goose pictures below.

Birds and Rabbit

Here are some pictures BC sent in. The first one is a rabbit. This is pretty easy to tell even though the prints of the feet are not very clear. It is some sort of a bounder/hopper, a bit too deep in the snow for a squirrel (also not headed for a tree). Weasels also bound, but this is too big for that and anyway weasels are rare. So even without going up close enough to look at the footprints you can figure this out.

But what is this? Yes, a bird. Thank you. What kind of bird? Well, it is pacing rather than hopping, which not all birds do. It's not a junco (click on the link to see junco tracks) or a sparrow or a finch or any of those little hopping birds. Let's look at another picture.

Normally you try to get closer to figure things out. In this case moving back a bit helps. The boot track gives us a scale so we have some idea how big this bird is (You may have noticed some of the pictures have ruler in them. This helps with scale.) This is a fairly big bird. Plus it is pacing around, not hopping. A crow would probably be the best bet. Since he found enough tracks to figure out which was it was going and how fast this counts as an animal tracked for BC, and of course, a picture of tracks.