- Hello, I'm Joshua, a naturalist for Five Rivers Metroparks, and today we're gonna explore the incredible world of animal tracking, which is a bigger world than you might think.

So, it's more than just the imprint that the animal might leave behind, but it's also maybe what their bones look like after they have died in the woods, or maybe a tuft of fur that was left over from somebody's dinner, or maybe what the animal leaves behind after its own dinner when it poops in the woods.

All of these different characteristics are identifiable and allow us to know what kind of animals roam our Metroparks that we love so much.

Let's go on a hike and explore some of these imprints that they leave behind in the mud.

So when you're out tracking, snow and sand are really good for looking at the animal's overall behavior, because you'll get multiple imprints throughout the entire track.

However, mud is just really great media for capturing a real good look of what the toes actually look like.

And so, here, as you might have guessed, this is white tailed deer.

Very common in our Metroparks.

And this deer is actually traveling in this direction, so if you think about the print as being an arrow, it's pointing into the direction of travel of this creature.

Here is a raccoon track right here.

So, raccoons are easily identifiable by the hand-like or fingers that you can see there.

But then also, what separates raccoons from a lot of other creatures in your Metroparks, is that their foot track is what's called plantigrade, which means they are applying even pressure throughout the entire track.

You don't see any unevenness within the track like you do of a lot of other common animals, like for an example, dog, where you get different impressions.

And here is another set of raccoon imprints and as you can tell, the raccoon is applying even pressure throughout the entire print with those hand-like paws.

Here's a very common track that you're gonna find in your Metroparks and these are domestic dogs, which are easily recognizable by the multiple imprints that they'll leave in the mud.

So, if you recall, the last time you went to the mailbox when there about two feet of snow in your front lawn, you probably used the same tracks to get back to your house that you left when you went out to the mailbox.

So, you do that for efficiency.

Well, animals with four legs will do the same thing, just immediately, so the back foot will go right where the front foot was.

So, however, through thousands of years of breeding the different breeds of dogs that we have today, we have bred out some of those efficiencies.

And due to that, when dogs will move around on the trails, you will find multiple prints for the same animal.

So, as you can tell, there's one right here, another one right here, and another right here.

And this animal is from the same individual animal moving in the same direction.

Coyotes are very common throughout Metroparks and they like to use human trails too, which means it can be tricky to differentiate them between the domestic dog.

But as we were talking about earlier, you can see this imprint of a coyote is perfect right here.

You don't see any overlapping of maybe a hind foot.

That hind foot went right where that front foot came from.

And you can see that as we move through this track, you can tell that there's very little overlap throughout all off them.

You can also notice that, if you're gonna extrapolate where this coyote was going, it's traveling in a straight line and if it was snowy on the ground, you would be able to see that.

Every dog walker knows that dogs constantly move from one side of the trail to the next, however coyotes, they know where they wanna go, and they know that they gotta get there and they wanna move quickly.

So, typically, when you see coyotes, you see them moving in a straight line.

We will end today's tracking adventure with an incredible find.

This is a bobcat track.

You can easily identify a bobcat by its sheer size.

And for those of you that have house cats at home that walk all over your cars and leave little kitty tracks everywhere, you will also notice that cat tracks also show no claws.

So that's a big differentiation between them and our wild canines, as those wild canines are always gonna show claws in their prints.

However, these wild cats are not, domestic cats also are not.

So, here we have a really nice bobcat.

And now I have to confess this bobcat is not natural.

I was walking around with this trusty little print and had to take advantage of it to make a bobcat, because bobcat tracks are of course hard to find out in your Metroparks.

But they are around, especially in the Twin Valley.

So, get outside and explore, and see if you can find these tracks.

So as you can imagine, we just barely scraped the surface of animal tracking.

There's a lot of things to learn out there, there's a lot of good resources and books to explore, so I encourage you to just go out, try something new.

So as you're hiking today, just pay attention to some of the things that animals leave behind in the mud and you might be surprised what shares this world right next to you.

Thanks for watching and we'll see you out on the trails.

Take care.