- Hi, I'm Doug and I'm here at Germantown Metro Park and on this bright winter day it's the perfect time to get outside and look for some animal signs and their tracks.

We're gonna look at these tracks and see if we can tell a story about the animal from what we find.

So come on with me and let's go look.

What I like about tracks in the winter is that they can tell you a story about which way the animal was going and how fast it was moving too.

Like when I'm walking and I'm taking a couple steps, well my footprints are close together and I can tell I'm not really running.

But if I'm running of course my footsteps are gonna be farther away and then my stride is bigger and I can tell that I'm moving faster.

It's the same way with wildlife too.

Sometimes when you're in the woods you might find deer tracks and deer have a split hoof, and so it looks like two toes that are down there and you can tell which way the deer was walking by looking at which end has the toe mark.

So we're looking along the same trail that it went in late winter.

Also, another sign of deer might be that the male box dropped their antlers.

And this one was dropped several years ago, you can tell cause there looks like chew marks on it, probably mice were chewing on it.

Deer antlers that were dropped this year would be nice and smooth and shiny.

And following the deer trail, we can also see, well here's a place, when animals have to eat, they, a lot of times will have to use the the bathroom and make their poop.

We call it scat.

And so here's some deer scat that's been left here and that's just part of how nature works.

This set of deer tracks looks like it was walking and not taking a big step in between each movement.

Here we have some deer tracks where there's a big gap between them, that tells me that this animal was really in a hurry and it was jumping from set to set of tracks.

The faint markings on the snow and the seeds from this aster flower that had been eaten tells me a little bird was here in the winter getting what it needs.

I like looking at rabbit tracks because you can see they look like an L. Here is his two front feet that came here and his back feet came in front of those and then he leaped forward over here.

So they kind of make an L shape in the snow and that makes it easy to recognize them.

Look at the distance between these rabbit tracks.

This guy was really hopping.

And then later on he'll slow down.

Now you can see the rabbits moving a little slower, not quite so much distance between them.

Squirrels are famous for finding nuts and putting them in the ground and in the wintertime they follow their nose and they find their nuts and they dig them up and eat them.

And then they turn around and they find some other places to go to look for food.

Bye squirrel.

Have a good time out here.

Looks like the squirrel had been eating a walnut.

You can see where he's chewed into it.

I wonder what made these tracks, two lines in the snow.

Well, I guess we solved that mystery.

They are cross country ski tracks and so no matter how you like to make your tracks in the snow, in the wintertime, if it's walking, or running, or even cross country skiing, you can always enjoy the other animals that are out here as well and see the tracks that they're leaving and the signs, and have a great adventure.

So I hope to see you out there on the trails.

Enjoy this winter.

It's a great time to be outside.