The Girls Go Tracking up Old Woman Creek

We arrived down South Tuesday night to a lively potluck and talk with Paul Houghtaling, which included a great download of information on our quarry for the next day.

In the morning, we all reviewed the topo map and chose our routes according to the information Paul had given us. Our areas included a fire road on a ridge, a creekside road, and a creekside trail. The women in the group all felt pulled toward Old Woman Creek, and so we formed our own group and set out together.

Before we left, I asked if anyone had any plaster, as one of my goals is to plaster-cast a good track before some classmates and I start our summer kid’s programs with the Riekes Center. No one had any, but I figured I’d have more chances, and there wasn’t much likelihood of finding the perfect track I had in mind, anyway. I’d never encountered one before, after all.

One group took the ridge and found many deer tracks, some bobcat and fox sign, but our quarry was markedly absent.

Another group took the road by a creek. There was little immediate evidence of deer, bobcat and fox, but they very soon found some unique and distinctive sign:




Broad, deep, dark scrapes in the ground, all on the creek side of the road, under a stand of trees. One scrape even had a pile of big, fur-filled scat in it. It had rained the night before, stopping around 3 AM. Some of the scrapes didn’t look terribly rained on.

We women started up the dirt road by Old Woman Creek at a pretty fast clip. I had to lengthen my stride to keep up, and still was left slightly behind wondering how we were supposed to closely observe the landscape for track and sign if we were charging ahead so energetically. We stopped once in a while, did some more in-depth looking around, but mostly moved on.


Even at our relatively high speed, I noticed that compared to most of the creekside trails near my home, this one showed a near-total lack of deer tracks and sign. Once in a while deer trails would cross the road, but I don’t remember noting a single deer track paralleling the road. Near my house, a road like this would be a highway for deer activity along the tasty (to a ruminant) riparian zone of the creek, but here they seemed to avoid following the road. The trail intersections also lacked another sign that I’ve come to expect, as common as punctuation in a sentence for the area where I live: grey fox scat marking every intersection and landmark available. This road seemed oddly unpunctuated.

We also found this incredible tree along the road:


We stopped to look at an oddly-shaped smudge in the mud. It was fairly fresh, certainly after the last rains, and crisp. There print even held the texture of the original object. On seeing it everyone in our group sat up a bit more, and scanned the woods around. We all knew what it looked like, but we speculated anyway.



“Could it be a knee print? Someone jogging up here this morning in shorts, knelt down here for some reason?” We entertained this and other ideas, but were mostly convinced that we’d found what we were looking for. Careful inspection of the print revealed that it had come down second, on top of a similar print just ahead of it. As we circled the print and studied it closely, we even began to see toe marks.

Further along the trail, we found more marks:




As we read the marks in the mud, made our measurements and shared high-fives, I tracked the animal’s progress up the trail. In my mind’s eye, I could see the golden, sloped back flexing with the animal’s stride, the long tail held low, perhaps twitching with each new scent the animal caught, long limbs moving relaxed and easy, extending far less than their possible range. I saw the blocky head set on a short neck, turning once in a while to catch a sound or a twitch of motion, and the narrow but powerful shoulders moving with the measured rhythm of his steps. I saw him meander across the road, investigate the edge and move along on his morning patrol, padding slow and mindful of his effect on the forest.



And finally we found this, a textbook example of a big male Puma concolor track. Of course I didn’t have plaster.


It began to rain as we headed back to the cars, filling the tracks with muddy water and highlighting them beautifully in the mud of the road.