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Wildlife Tracking
On
Saturday, February 12, 2005, the Walden Woods Project and Walden Keeping Track
offered an afternoon of presentations and field education called Who's
Walking in Walden Woods. The program was
attended by more than sixty people from the greater Boston
Area.
Well-known regional trapper and tracking teacher, Bob Metcalf, presented a slide
show of the many kinds of wildlife tracks participants could expect
to encounter in their outing and he offered several clues to help identify each
of the tracks.
After the slide presentation, everyone bundled up and headed out to the
Concord
Landfill, Brister's Hill,
and parts of the
Walden State Pond Reservation to see what they could find.
It was a crisp sunny mid-winter day. A
medium snow had fallen a few days prior, so the tracking opportunities were abundant. Groups found tracks
of field
mice, rabbits, deer, voles, fisher, fox and other wildlife. One group
identified what they believed to be black bear markings on one of the beech
trees in the grove at the Thoreau institute. After two hours in the
chill, everyone was ready to head back inside.
Some of our staff
members as well as some of our participants took some great photographs of our
afternoon. Jeffrey Collins, a
field ecologist with Mass
Audubon ecological extension, has plotted the trackers data from this outing
on a GIS map
(Coming Soon!).
To see upcoming
Discovering Walden Woods programs as well as the other upcoming programs at
Walden Woods, please visit our Calendar.
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