Printed in the Snow: Animal tracks reveal what keeps wildlife busy in winter

Madeleine Bray

If you’re out in the woods this winter, there may be evidence of overlapping animal tracks in all different shapes and sizes, showing the paths that animals walked at some point between your most recent outdoor excursion and the last snowfall. These tracks are mostly invisible all other times of the year, but with the high contrast provided by snow, they become obvious to the eye.

Some animals, such as squirrels and songbirds, are easy to spot in the winter, but not all animals want to make their presence known. In the winter, animals only really travel beyond their dens and nests to search for food and may only be active at dusk or at nighttime. In these cases, the prints left behind after their nighttime excursions may be the only evidence that certain animals live around you. Knowing how to identify animals based on their tracks paints a vivid picture of what happens in the forest when you aren’t looking. 

Snow provides ideal conditions to identify animals by their tracks, offering a clean slate where fresh prints can be highly visible and very distinct. Clear prints, such as those left by a coyote, are only fully visible in a medium like snow or wet sand where the number of toes, the size of the print, and even the differences between front and rear paws, can be used to provide a positive identification. 

However, clear, well-formed prints can be rare to find. Tracks can be buried in deep leg holes or distorted as snow melts around the print. This can make identification difficult, but not impossible! Such distortions can be overcome by taking in the bigger picture and identifying gait or walking pattern. An animal’s gait, such as a rabbit’s hop, can tell you what lives nearby at a glance. The distance between tracks (known as the stride), and the width of the tracks (known as the straddle), can help you identify local wildlife. These are both features that identification guides will describe with measurements and illustrations.

Porcupines, for example, rarely leave behind clear prints in the snow. They walk rather slowly and close to the ground, dragging their feet as they travel from their dens to whatever their source of food may be. As such, a porcupine’s tracks in the winter may just look like a deep trench with only vague evidence of their slow, dragging prints at the bottom.

Animal tracks tell you what lives in the forest, and also how they live, too. Tracks tell us where animals go, where they sleep, and even where they hunt. Owl strikes are a dramatic example: these are the imprints in the snow made by an owl’s wings after it has heard some small prey skittering beneath the snow. These prints often have a messy hole in the centre where the owl sought to catch its meal. 

There are many tracking guide books and online resources. The Ontario Envirothon Mammal Identification and Tracking Guide, from Forests Ontario, can help you identify some of the more common mammals in the province by the tracks they leave behind. The next time you find tracks, try to see what stories they may be telling you.