Weekend Walks

Weekend Walks in the woods are my favorite. Especially in the snow. I just love seeing all the different animal tracks and figuring out what they are. Betty of course also loves walking in the woods, and especially the snow.

While many are starting to see signs of spring, here in Northern Vermont, we're still very much in winter and buried in snow. We had an additional 15 inches last week, and about an inch this morning. Most places in the yard and field, I was sinking to above my knees.

We had a few days above freezing, and most areas are half that depth now, but still challenging to walk without the snowshoes.

It's a good bit of exercise just walking around the field with either the snowshoes on or when just boots and sinking a foot or two into the snow with each step.

It's of course even more exciting to go deeper into the woods and see the wild places. In some of our trips out into the woods we spotted some unusual tracks that I couldn't identify. We followed some a bit and found a well beaten path that led to a large hole in the bank under a large brushpile.

From the size, I thought at first maybe a fox, bobcat, mink, or fisher. The prints were not defined well enough to determine, and they didn't look quite right for either one.

I put up a trailcam, and checked it a week later. It caught a couple pictures, but I still couldn't tell what it was, the quality was poor and only caught the back of it.

What the heck was this beast? Porcupine? Badger?

After another couple weeks and a few more poor pics, I still couldn't tell what it was. I decided to upgrade my 20 year old trailcam for a newer model that had better resolution, more sensing distance, better infra-red night light, and that could do video.. I just had to know what this was.

Since the old Bushnell had worked for me so well over 20 years, I went with the same brand, just upgraded model.
It runs off 8 AA batteries, and will run for several months between changes if you've got a large enough SD Card to hold the pictures.

Another week and aha! We caught the culprit.

Turns out it was our friend the GroundHog. Also known as a Woodchuck, Marmot, or other names depending on local trends. This guy has apparently not seen his shadow for a while given our weather!

Here's some video action.. It helped a lot more in identifying it. Those stills were actually pulled from the video.

I've got at least 50 pics / videos of that tail view lol. Took a bit to catch the front. Looks like this one is headed back to the hole! So long!

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