The best winter morning is not the one when it snows. It is two days later. The snow has settled, it is still fresh on top, and everything that moved over two nights is written on it. A forest track you know by heart suddenly becomes a logbook: who came by, in which direction, walking or bounding.
It is the easiest activity to do with children in the mountains, because it needs no equipment and no particular level. Just knowing what to look at.
When to go, and where to look
The right moment is two or three days after a spell of snow or rain. Too soon, the tracks are wiped out or blurred. Too late, they have melted and widened, and a widened print lies about its size.
The most rewarding places are tracks and paths, which mammals readily use, woodland edges and animal runs, which they prefer to everything else, and muddy surfaces, stream banks and pond edges. Snow cover has an advantage nothing else offers: it shows not only the print, but also the stride, the trail and the gait.
Three families, and nothing else to remember at first
All ground prints fall into three families. Hooves are the unguligrades: roe deer, chamois, wild boar, red deer. Pads are the digitigrades: fox, dog, cat, lynx, marten, badger. Hands are the plantigrades: squirrel, hare, beaver, hedgehog.
Asking this question first, hooves, pads or hands, rules out three quarters of the possibilities in two seconds. It is the only habit to build.
Measure, without fooling yourself
Measure the greatest length, claws excluded, and the greatest width. And bear in mind that the size of a print varies with the ground, the animal’s age, sex and size, its speed and its gait. It points you in a direction. It never decides on its own.
If you take a photo, put a ruler next to it, or failing that a pen, a bunch of keys or a lens cap. A photo of a print without a scale is useless, and it is the mistake everyone makes the first time.
The five prints you really meet here
- Roe deer. Two visible toes of the same size, rounded edge, three to five centimetres. Sometimes four toes if the ground is soft or the animal is running and jumping: those are the dewclaws marking behind.
- Chamois. Two toes as well, but unequal, and the edge is concave or flat rather than rounded. Triangular shape, about six centimetres. It is the asymmetry that decides, not the size.
- Wild boar. Four visible toes, sometimes two, and a print eight to twelve centimetres wide. Impossible to mistake for anything else around here.
- Fox or dog. Four pads, visible claws, and a test that tells them apart: if a line drawn between the two side pads clearly cuts through the central pads, it is a dog. If it does not, it is a fox.
- Hare. Front and hind feet the same size, fur visible in the print. Three to three and a half centimetres by four to five. A rabbit leaves the same, only smaller.
The vocabulary that changes everything
Three words, and you read a story instead of a shape. The stride is the distance between two prints. The trail is the set of four prints from a single movement. And the position of those four prints relative to each other gives the gait: walk, trot, run, bound.
This is where it gets interesting with children. You no longer say “it is a roe deer”. You say “it is a roe deer that was bounding, and it went that way”.
The other clue, the one nobody looks at
Droppings confirm what the print suggests, and they are often easier to read. Four markers are enough to start with.
- Rice-grain shapes one to one and a half centimetres long, more than eight millimetres across, plant content: roe deer.
- A ball that looks like chipboard, straw-coloured, slightly compressed in winter: hare.
- A dropping rounded at one end and tapering at the other with hair, five to ten centimetres: fox.
- Dried figs stuck together, seven to nine centimetres: wild boar.
Two precautions to repeat to children before they get close. Do not touch with bare hands, because of the risk of disease. And do not sniff, even though smell can be a good clue, because of the risk of parasites. Look, measure, photograph.
One thing not to do
Follow a trail to the end. It is tempting, and it is exactly what you should not do in winter. At the end of the trail is an animal already running an energy deficit, which will have to flee. I have set out what that escape really costs in what crossing your path costs a chamois: in fifty centimetres of snow, ten times more energy than normal movement, and sixty times more uphill.
Read the track, measure it, photograph it, and carry on your way. That is also what makes the difference between observing and disturbing.
To practise before you go out
The tracks and signs quiz covers all of this in thirty-two questions, from the wild boar to the lynx, with every answer explained. Each level takes five minutes, and it is a good way to fill the evening before an outing.
All the keys mentioned here are gathered in the identification keys to take with you, with the download links. On the ground, family outings are the easiest way to get started, and wildlife and plants of the Haute Chaîne du Jura presents the species that leave these tracks.
To learn to read the snow in the field, the Winter tracks and wildlife outing is one of the snowshoe outings in the Jura I run from December to March.
Sources
- Identification key “Traces et indices de vie, les empreintes” (tracks and signs of life, prints), France Nature Environnement Haute-Savoie.
- Simplified identification key “Traces et indices de vie, les crottes” (tracks and signs of life, droppings), France Nature Environnement Haute-Savoie.
- Learning booklet “Les difficultés de la faune en hiver”, Hiver sauvage, montagne en partage kit, for the energy expenditure figures.