One of the on-going projects in Apologia Elementary Zoology 3 is to make a notebook of animal tracks. In addition, the lesson that we just finished has a project to try to collect animal tracks in your backyard using wet cement in a pan and food for bait. Hopefully, an animal will walk through the pan and leave tracks for the students to identify.
I’m up for a lot of projects, but when I saw that one I thought, "No way are we doing that!". As it turns out, we didn’t need to. We got snow here on Sunday night. This morning (Tuesday), I looked out on my front porch to a surprise zoology project.
The problem is, we can’t tell what kind of tracks they are.
I think maybe the front foot prints are butting up against the back foot prints.
With the front and back feet moving together, it doesn’t seem like the way a dog or cat walks.
It seems like maybe a rabbit? The tracks are like a hopping animal. But here is the weirdest part. The tracks come up the porch steps…
Up the rocking chair…
And over the porch rail? What animal would do that? A cat doesn’t like the snow and might walk really funny like that. But I don’t know why a cat would wander that far in the snow. (We don’t have one.)
So, any opinions?
By Kristen H.
We use Apologia too and we live in a very densely populated city up on the top floor of an apartment building so those kinds of projects work to make me think creatively! We don't ever get snow here but we do see bird tracks in the mud. Your mystery prints are a lot of fun. Would a squirrel do something like that? Hope you find out…
We saw one in our yard today that was hopping from place to place because of the snow.
ps. we are in NC too!
I'd say it's a squirrel – if you watch a squirrel's movement, it runs, and maybe rests, with all fours on the ground at once. Their hind feet rest about even or slightly in front of their forefeet (forefeet in between the hind feet).