The Daily Bucket is a regular feature of the Backyard Science group. It is a place to note of any observations you have made of the world around you. Rain, sun, wind...insects, birds, flowers...meteorites, rocks...seasonal changes...all are worthy additions to the bucket. Please let us know what is going on around you in a comment. Include, as close as is comfortable for you, where you are located. Each note is a record that we can refer to in the future as we try to understand the patterns that are quietly unwinding around us.
December 2013
Salish Sea,
Pacific Northwest
All the reports I've been hearing from snowy parts of the country - and the pictures of animal tracks in snow - got me to thinking about the tracks I see around here, the decidedly non-snowy Pacific Northwest. There aren't many places to see tracks very well, but the best track material is damp fine sand freshly cleaned by the latest tide. A nearby beach is one of the few places on my island with those conditions. These are some tracks I've seen there in the last week, and a few of the creatures that make them.
(continued below the clump of sand...)
(photos in Lightbox; click to enlarge)
Gull and killdeer tracks (large and small, respectively), both very common on the beach. Each was skirting this rock, though who was first I have no way of knowing.
Gulls actually have webbed feet, though the webbing didn't imprint on this hard sand here. On mushier sand we can see the shape of their whole feet. These webbed feet make them fine swimmers. However unlike many birds with webbed feet, such as ducks and cormorants, gulls can also stride around on land briskly, and will easily take to the air if need be too.
With a bit more skill I might be able to distinguish between the gulls that leave tracks so abundantly on the wet sand of beaches here, at least by size, and narrow down identification. We have both large gulls (Glaucous-Winged Gulls are the most common) and small ones (mostly Mew Gulls at this time of year, Larus canus).
Mew gulls frequently flock, like these.
I see a small flock of killdeer (Charadrius vociferus) most days on this beach, 4-8 of them at a time. They leave lots of tracks, as well as holes from probing into the sand. A single oystercatcher, with similar tracks, may join them. Its pace is much more measured.
Sometimes killdeer skitter up onto the bare sand, but mostly they are feeding amongst the cobbles and seaweed near the water. They can be difficult to see, camouflaged as they are, but they make quite a ruckus (their scientific name suggests that!), so I can find them that way.
Northwestern Crows (Corvus caurinus) frequent the beach too, hunting and scavenging. The Northwesterns prefer the beach, and are a bit smaller in size than the more Common Crow, but frankly I can't tell them apart. These might be either.
Mammals use the beach too. River otters are back and forth between the shore and the water a lot on this beach, sometimes singly but more often in a group. I think these are otter tracks. I see Mink on and around this beach too, but my sources suggest mink tracks show more claw. The three otters in the following pic are on a favorite offshore rock, stopping to look at me before disappearing around the corner.
Here are some tracks I suspect are deer. We have a huge population of Black-Tail deer on the island that will go anywhere they can. I have seen deer on the beach. Our deer are smaller than mainland Black-Tails.
And the following type of tracks are very very common, usually accompanied by human tracks:
Once the sand dries out, it caves in, making it hard to identify tracks. Next to these circle marks, created by shreds of dried eelgrass spun by the wind, are a shorebird's tracks. At this time of year we have few possibilities, and not many walk around high up on the beach. Most likely killdeer again, but that's a guess.
Even when there aren't animals actually on the beach when I'm there, it's interesting to try to reconstruct what kind of action there has been. In this part of the country, fine damp sand is our best bet.
I'm a beginner at identifying tracks and welcome thoughts from other nature-watchers about what these signs tell us: identity or behavior.
What's up in your part of the world? Seeing any signs animals have left behind? Please share in the comments.
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