I got out Friday evening to look at what's happened with the topsoil harvest. As always the changes are quite disorienting--it's dificult to remember just how where that berm was, or that heap, now that everything has been moved around, including some long-standing features of the landscape.
This is an image I posted back on July 6
The tree on the right side of the image is the same
as the tree on the right in the first photo.
I took the photograph of the work this morning. The equipment driving in, and the scraping has produced and fine dusty surface that takes prints well.
I would like to say what left this print, but I don't know. I think it's a fox print (it had that vibe...), but it could be a coyote. Both frequent the area, and the differences between their feet are pretty subtle. The stride looks longer relative to the size of the foot in the photo than it seemed to me in the field (I had no tape measure with me.) The print itself measured about five centimetres long (without the nails). Fox and coyote feet are very close to the same size. Could it have been a dog? Sure...but the trail is in a straight line like a cat's trail and the track is "open," i.e., lots of space in the middle, between the toe pads, both suggesting "not a dog." There are sometimes dogs "at large" around here--but they are usually bigger than this track suggests.
I was very pleased to see this track--for a hot summer, I have seen very few snakes, and to me, a track is almost as good as a sighting.
Not a very big snake--track was only half an inch wide (1.25 cm), but not tiny either.
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