By Bryan DiFabio

Central Mass Wildlife Tracking Club meets monthly in various locations around MA. Geared towards newcomers, but all levels are welcome to participate. Though instructor led, the concept is to find anomalies in the natural world then discuss as a group what may have taken place. Below is a recap of a typical field day.

Thanks to all who came out this past Sunday to Gate 29 at the Quabbin Reservoir. We had a nice variety of species and barely had to venture from the main road into the deep snow.

We started off the day gathering at the gate with some lively conversations with the participants. This type of energy is always a nice way to start the day. As we made our way down the road, we were greeted with quite a number of squirrel tracks. As we followed them around a bit we found someone had spread some seed for them (that explains that). We debated trail length between the squirrel species, and settled on grey squirrel. We came across many other squirrel tracks throughout the day and discussed how to differentiate between them. Some general, but not static, guidelines that could be helpful is 4 inch trail width for gray, 3 inch for red, and 2 inch for chipmunk. Southern flying squirrel would be closest to chipmunk in size but you’ll see the front feet more towards the front of the bounding pattern vs other squirrels (due to physical limitations).

For the entire length of the walk, there were lengthy coyote trails of two or more animals back and forth along the road. We discussed that knowing the weather we just had (36 hours for a 2-4 inch snow, then 12 hours for a lighter dusting) that we could age the tracks, which there were trails we noticed created around both time periods. We also discussed some ways to determine direction of travel (shallow in, deep out – then look for mounds of built up snow towards the front).

Moving forward, we were excited to come across some snowshoe hare trails. Beautiful tracks were found which showed both the bound and morphology of this creature.

We did at one point venture off the trail and were rewarded with a nice Ruffed Grouse Trail. We followed it for a bit and found scat, but not sure where it roosted. The trail stopped in a group of hemlocks with plenty of good low branches for roosting, but not scat to be found. We discussed the foot morphology a bit on this one and how we deduced grouse (classic game bird structure, too small for turkey, no quail in the area)

Shortly after finding the grouse trail, we noticed some disturbance on a hemlock right by the road, then the available sign opened up to trails and tons of feeding behavior of a porcupine! A well gnawed hemlock where it had been feeding, then several trails leading to and from the tree into a culvert. All very recent, some of the members of the group could detect the distinct smell of a porcupine in the area. Look at the size of the branch it chewed!

Some more sights of the day were plenty of coyote scent marking, coyote estrus sign, some sign that birds had been feeding on berries closeby, some unidentified bird tracks – likely a passerine, and an aged oak gall. Before we turned around to head back to the parking lot, we discussed the wasps that are cause of these oak galls, but then also the goldenrod galls and the culprits that case them (bunch gall, top of goldenrod is a mite, ball galls more rounded are a fly, then the cylindrical galls are caused by a moth).