Posts Tagged With: natty bumppo

Animal tracks show up well in fresh snow and some people enjoy getting out and “reading” the “stories” those tracks have to tell, but generally the plot lines aren’t much. The woods are full of the apparently random ramblings of rodents and lagomorphs.

“A squirrel went from this beech to that maple” or “a hare passed by this log yesterday” are recurring themes in the woods.

There are times, though, when the story might be interesting, and you don’t even need to be Natty Bumppo in order to cipher it out.

If a large man on large snowshoes trudges across the frozen January crust it looks like this:

If a Northern Hawk Owl comes down on a vole it looks like this:

And if a coyote walks by and a rodent panics, “swims” to the surface and makes a break for it, that rodent is not long for this world. When the trait that causes poor decision making is eliminated from the mouse gene pool it looks like this, with coyote #1 on the left flushing the mouse, which skedaddled to the right where it was promptly pounced upon by coyote #2 :

Not really a thriller, and not much of a mystery, but at least somebody got a snack out of it.