The Best Find Yet

We had an all-day tracking agenda today! Before my two teams even entered the woods of Banning State Park, an area only trafficked by animals this time of year, we came across one of the coolest things I've found while tracking. A large wolf bed! You can see the perfect outline of this big guy/girl's fore-legs, belly tuft, and hind-legs! My glove is there for scale.

Here is how big the tracks were up close!

A pair of fox tracks intersected with the larger canine's and you can really see the difference. Foxes benefit from the presence of wolves because wolves compete with coyotes, who out compete the foxes.

I also found very fresh bobcat tracks on my way between the two teams I was assisting! This is really cool because I study bobcats from California so this is a nice link for me.

There were really cool fisher tracks too! These are weasels who hunt porcupines. They're pretty big too.

Today was challenging. A lot of things went amiss in the field. But we have great people on out team and everything ended up okay.