NORTHFIELD — It might not look like it, but there are always signs of life in the winter woods. It just might take trained eyes are to see them.
A few families showed up at the Northfield Mountain Recreation and Environmental Center Saturday for a lesson on tracking animals in the winter with educator Kathy Richards. In about an hour and a half, she pointed out signs of squirrels, deer and woodpeckers.
Before putting on some snowshoes and heading out into the mountain’s icy network of trails, Richards debriefed everyone on the most important thing to look for: footprints.
There are four different types of footprints to look for in the snow, she said. There’s the “perfect walker” footprints, made by medium or tall animals with long legs, like coyotes and foxes. With a “perfect walker” gait, an animal’s hind paws step into the same spot where their front paws were a moment before. Richards had a graphic drawn up: _ – _ – _
“Hopper” footprints are created by animals with long hind legs, like squirrels, and look like this: : = : = : =
There are also “waddler” footprints, left by round-bodied animals like skunks, beavers and raccoons, which look like “perfect walker” footprints, except with small steps in between the longer prints. And there’s “bounder” footprints, from animals with short legs and long thin bodies, like weasels or otters: :: :: :: ::
“We’re most likely to see perfect-walker or hopper tracks,” Richards said.
She was right — only a short distance into the group’s walk, there were some “perfect walker” tracks. Only these weren’t so perfect, indicating the animal was lazily walking, probably a dog out on a leisurely walk, rather than the truly perfect footprints of a coyote or fox, determined in its stride and hunting for food.
But just a bit further along, a hopper trail, just as Richards had described, with even the imprints of the animal’s toes visible in the snow.
“What do you think this might be?” she asked, following the set of footprints.
It took a few guesses, but the tracks led straight to a tree and disappeared, prompting Casey Hanna, 6, to exclaim, “A squirrel!”
The lesson was part of the Winter Wildlife Detective program, and Richards said she has given it once a year for the last few years.
“It gets the families out, gets the kids to see the tracks,” Richards said.
There were other lessons on the winter wilderness given. Branches slightly snapped at the end could be from a foraging deer, or scrapes on the bark of a tree could be from a buck ready to shed its antlers.
At one point, the group came across a tree that looked rather out of place in the white and gray landscape.
“It’s a cucumber,” said Noah Capponcelli, 7, there with his mother, Kelly.
It did, in fact, look somewhat like a cucumber with branches. The tree was kelly green, slender and smooth, with hardly any texture on its bark.
“This is a striped maple,” Richards explained. “This tree is green, because even though it’s in the winter, it can take in sunlight.”
Further along the trail, streaks of dried sap ran down the trunk of a large maple tree. Richards directed the hikers to follow the streaks with their eyes, all the way up until — sure enough — a gaping hole made by a pileated woodpecker, the source of the running sap.
Oftentimes the sap will stain the snow at the foot of the tree, Richards said, another clue that a woodpecker has been there.
The pileated woodpecker is the largest woodpecker on earth — maybe the second largest, if the ivory-billed woodpecker is still lurking in the forests of the southeastern U.S., not quite extinct.
And it’s right here in New England, leaving signs that become lessons of the forest.
Reach David McLellan at dmclellan@recorder.com or 413-772-0261, ext. 268.