Creature feature

Today was relatively warm (about 10 above) so I walked the dogs up the creek. With the overflow ice changing the topography, it's like a whole different place than in the summer. It had just snowed lightly on Friday, so conditions were perfect for identifying animal tracks. There were a ton of rabbit tracks, which is somewhat new -- I haven't seen very many rabbit tracks around here before. Also saw fox (as usual -- we have a million foxes, either that, or one or two very active ones), moose tracks, squirrel tracks, vole and shrew tracks (which I think I'm finally getting better at telling apart), and what appear to be the tracks of some sort of canine a little smaller than Lucky. I would say coyote except that I didn't think we had them here. Maybe a large fox, or a fox with a sloppy stride, so that its front and back tracks overlap incompletely and make the tracks look larger than they really are. Or perhaps a juvenile wolf or a very lost stray dog?

Lucky, being deprived of his genetic function as bird retriever since we don't hunt birds, likes to "retrieve" trash and bring it to me -- cans, bottles, that sort of thing. Today, with some excitement, he retrieved a strange, snow-encrusted polar-fleece object from a snowbank, which I gently took from his jaws and brought home for identifying. After thawing it, it turned out to be a very large dog bootie. It must belong to the neighbors' German shepherd, because as far as I know, they are the only people who ever go for walks in "our" woods, except for a couple weeks in the fall when the hunters come out from town.

The only actual animals that I saw was a flock of chickadees, which were singing their spring "chick-dee-dee" song instead of their more twittery winter song. Alas, spring is still a way off yet.