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.