Exploring for wildlife

It was dark day here on the Front Range, with gray skies dimming our world.  This morning, K and I wandered the forest near our house. I watched her body language closely, to try to guess which of my wildlife cameras had been visited recently based on her interest in scents.

K did not signal that the mule deer buck, shown below, had passed through a gully near our house. However, his visit was almost 24 hours earlier.

She did tell me that these two visitors had come close to our house. The cryptic coyote trotting briskly past the camera...

 A young buck who walking carefully past the camera...

As we wandered, I noticed that K was gravitating toward all the boulders. With her new boot, I think that her paw doesn't bother her at all while we hike so she loves standing on the boulders.

I decided to try letting her off-leash for a little while, for the first time a few months. As I expected, she simply walked along next to me. Before the bone infection in her paw, K would have been running to and fro, checking every tiny smell along the sides of the trail. I didn't expect that she was ready for that kind of frenzy so I'm glad that she walked calmly next to me.

After our walk, I did a long and quiet mountain bike ride. Although it's winter and the world is sleeping, the hues of gold, red, green, and gray are stunning. I think that most people were at the ski area on the horizon - they weren't on the trails!

 

I made a brief foray into a region where a friend and I tracked a bear a couple of weeks ago. I never wrote about that tracking experience but it was fascinating. We followed the bear's movements for a couple of hours, following day-old tracks.

In the photo below, the bear had walked through the snow toward where I was standing. He used a "direct registering" walk, where each hind paw fell exactly onto the track left by the front paw on the same side.

This bear was undoubtedly searching for a den. He climbed down into mining pits. Those pits are holes in the ground dug by miners searching for precious metals many years ago. After realizing that a mining pit didn't provide a good den, the bear plowed straight up huge boulder piles, nosing around in every nook and cranny.

In one place, the bear tried to enlarge an opening among a jumble of boulders by digging out dirt. His long claws ran into rock under the dirt, and he gave up, meandering deeper into the forest in search of his winter home.

Eventually, we ran out of daylight and headed back to our car. It was hard to drag ourselves away from the story of the bear, as told by his tracks in the snow.

Today, I returned to that area to scan for new tracks. I found an area where the bear left tell-tale tracks since my last visit. In one patch of snow, he'd come and gone, back and forth, many times. I marked the spot with my GPS and plan to visit later in the winter, when he's deeply asleep, to look around for his den.

I love tracking, seeing the story of a wild bear's travels in our forest unfold in the snow.

I can't wait until K can join me on these explorations in the forest again (although I'd never take her near a bear den - bears are very afraid of dogs). She was my tracking buddy last winter, and I hope that she can be again!