Night Visit

One of the few things I like about the snow is the fact that it records what happened while you weren't looking.  The original, although ephemeral, trail cam.  ;-)

Just as it told a tale here in January, so too we found a story in the snow this morning.  Andy always checks the barns, walks Holly and feeds the outdoor boiler early in the morning before I get up.  He's the early riser here.  Stepping out the side door onto the patio he found strange tracks that he didn't recognize.

Not cat, not dog, not raccoon, not possum or skunk, not fox, not bobcat, not coyote....

Here's one of our big boot prints and a quarter for scale.  You can just see a hint of claw print in front of some of the toes.

Bigger than a cat track (this is from Clem).....

Smaller than Holly's tracks but not by too darn much.....

The pawprints are curiously side by side rather than laying in a straight line with the hind feet stepping on the front foot track. The stride is pretty long, too.

Andy followed the trail.  It came out of the field to the south of the house, crossed the road and milled around in front of the barn door, crossed back onto the house side of the road, came up across the lawn and to our front door....

...followed the foundation around corners, under bushes, detoured onto the concrete breezeway porch, went all the way around Andy's shop along the track taken by the barn cats (yikes).....

....up and over the long concrete patio along side of the house, around the front and across the lawn, between the garage and Andy's sawmill building, up to the upper barns where it circled the empty stock trailer, went in and out of a machine shed, into and out the other side of another big Morton pole building and finally through the ram pasture fence and toward the woods.  This wasn't aimless meandering, this was the purposeful investigation that a smart predator makes when searching for opportunity.

We're pretty sure it was a fisher!  Aka fisher cat, although it's in the weasel family and not any kind of feline. Think of it as bigger than a mink and smaller than a wolverine. There's an outside chance it was an abnormally large marten but the pawprints measure 2.5 inches across and the two tracks together measure 4.5 inches across which is typical of fishers (the pic above with a quarter between 2 tracks shows 'to scale' on my screen.  The quarter is an inch across in real life and ditto on my monitor so measuring the tracks on the screen is accurate and just over 4.5 inches). 

They are a woodland creature and very arboreal as you can see in this video.  Here's one in a New Hampshire yard and a couple youngsters in a wildlife rehab facility.  We seem to be on the southern outskirts of its regular range but since they are predators ( = alert and elusive) and live in the woods it may be that they are 'here' but not seen or recognized for what they are.  A neighbor confirms having seen one last year a few roads over from us. Besides the squirrels, rabbits and rodents that make up the main part of their diets I'm sure they'd take any kind of birds they could get their teeth on, particularly ground nesters, and domestic chickens, ducks, rabbits and probably cats.  :-(   I'm happy to report that all barn cats are present and accounted for this AM!  We'd sure be happy to have the squirrel population reduced. They wreak havoc in the corn cribs.

So that was our cool thing for the day.  Note to self - invest in a good trail cam when possible!