When we come upon a site where a predator killed a prey animal, we’re able to see in detail the interaction between hunter and hunted. But finding such a site is a rare. It’s more common to find the trail of a successful hunter carrying its prey, and this also makes for fascinating study. To understand such a trail we must pick out the crucial evidence from the other disturbances that occur in animal trails. Let’s start with a fairly straightforward example.
In the photo below you see a trail made by a fisher loping from left to right. There are three typical fisher track groups, each group a place where the fisher landed and then took off. Above each track group you can see a curving gouge in the snow made by something the fisher was carrying. But what exactly was being carried? Could it have been a stick? Not likely, based on the length of the trail involved (it went on for quite a distance) and the consistency of the patterns. There’s also the fact that the marks are curved, suggesting that the item being carried was swinging slightly. (If you visit a place where dogs have been playing with sticks you’ll see how different it looks when a stick is being carried.) The predator would have been gripping the body of its prize, and something that extended to the side would have touched the snow at each landing. The curving marks are actually made up of two parallel lines, and these lines seem too widely separated to be claw marks from a dangling foot. Their size and positioning do seem about right for the tips of wing feathers, suggesting it was a bird. If it was a bird it couldn’t have been large, since it only touched the snow at the low points in the fisher’s bounding gait. A turkey would be much too big, and even a grouse would probably have left more traces in the snow. Perhaps it was something the size of a blue jay or a junco.
A short-tailed weasel bounding from upper left to lower right made the trail in the next photo. The trail consists of paired track impressions, a common pattern for small mustelids. To the left of each set of weasel prints there’s a thin, slightly curved line in the snow. There’s also a shorter and wider mark just ahead of the weasel tracks. The thin lines are the right size for a tail, and the wider depressions could have been a foot. Given the small size of a short-tailed weasel, it’s likely that the predator was carrying something equally small. A white-footed mouse seems unlikely, because its long tail would have made a longer stroke in the snow. My guess is either a meadow vole or a woodland vole.
The next photo shows the tracks of a fisher loping from right to left, and just below the tracks you see a wide groove. Below that groove you can see several lighter lines. These finer marks aren’t completely parallel with the deeper groove, so the deep groove and the fine lines must have come from separate body parts. The wider groove seems too deep and even to be something as light as a feather–was it a tail or perhaps a thickly furred foot? The finer lines could be the marks of dragging claws. This example is less clear than the two preceding ones, but I’m inclined to think the prey item was a mammal, perhaps a rabbit.
Now to some examples of marks that we often find in animal trails that don’t indicate dragging parts of a prey animal. In the next photo you see the trail of a long-tailed weasel bounding from bottom to top. There are grooves behind each landing spot, but they weren’t made by something being carried; the marks were made by the animal’s tail. Each time the weasel took off for the next bound its body sank into the snow, and the tail left a tapered groove. Tail marks are always connected to body impressions rather than being off to the side of the tracks as they are in the three preceding photos.
Here’s another example of potentially confusing disturbances that are not indicative of something being carried. The next photo shows the trail of a fisher walking from the lower right to the upper left. The fisher dragged the tips of its feet through the snow with each step. Notice that the drag marks are within the trail rather than to the side, and each drag mark extends completely or partially between two tracks.
Drag marks aren’t always as obvious as the ones shown above. In the next photo you see the trail of a coyote walking from top to bottom. In the lowest part of the photo there’s a thin line that was made by a single claw. There are wider gouges above that made by the rounded tips of the feet. But again the grooves lie within the trail width and always connect to tracks.
In the next photo we see what at first glance looks like the trail of some kind of otherworldly creature. It’s actually several coyote trails moving from left to right on a frozen waterway. To sort this out we need to focus in on the trail of each individual animal. The central part of the sequence draws our eye first: There’s an wavy drag mark that seems connected with the series of tracks in the center. If we look at just those tracks we see that they were made by a walking coyote. The drag mark seems to touch the prints, but toward the right it swings to the side and misses the tracks. This tells us that it’s not a foot drag but something that’s being carried. Above the central area there’s a similar string of tracks, and if we concentrate on those we see that they were made by another walking coyote. A third track sequence which lies below was made by yet another walking coyote. The outer trails are close to, but not on top of, the central trail, so there must have been two animals following close behind the one with the food item.
This scenario is supported by the next photo, which was taken in a place where the coyotes slowed down to go through a culvert. The tracks are closer together and the drag mark is more irregular. The drag mark touches one coyote print but misses the others, so it wasn’t made by the coyote’s feet. It’s definitely evidence of something being carried.
As to what was being carried, we can say it was a medium-sized object with a blunt projecting part and enough weight to make a deep groove in the snow. Claws would be thinner, an animal’s nose would be wider, an ear would be softer, and a tail would be fluffier and lighter. That would seem to eliminate all the medium-sized, winter-active animals in our region. But there’s another possibility: the detached body part of a deer with a protruding bone. The area where I found these tracks is a popular spot for hunters, and in mid-December, when I took the photos, coyotes would still have been scavenging on deer carcasses.
I’ll never know for sure, but a deer part is a reasonable conjecture, and conjecture is often what we’re left with when we attempt to understand the trail of a predators carrying dinner. Even without definite conclusions, the process of sorting out the details can be satisfying in itself.