This is the season of tracks, of things passing in the night and escorting the cold, gray days; shuffling, trotting, flopping things that leave delicate snowy records of other lives. Crying geese, quavering owls and flocks of tiny birds that fly like ghosts. Silent, sniffing furry creatures on terribly private missions.
We can intrude into their lives only after the fact: The wild creatures don`t want a lot to do with us, you know. And with good reason: If we aren`t shooting them, we`re running them down with cars. And worse yet, we assume that it is our right to act in such an arrogant and predatory manner.
The fact is, of course, this all came about through nothing more than a quirk of evolution in which we were the first to develop an ego. All of the other creatures have paid an awesome price for that circumstance over the ages. And they evolved defensive responses. The cottontail rabbit, for example, that gentlest of all wild creatures, geared up its reproductive capacities with a 28-day gestation period and developed a doe able to mate the same day she gives birth.
In the exercise of our ”superiority,” we domesticated some of the creatures so that they would be handy to eat, we trained others to bear our heavy burdens, and we made lap dogs out of the wolf`s decendents.
The record, in short, is not good. Illinois hunters shot 1.2 million cottontail rabbits in 1987, and motorists in Wisconsin killed an estimated 40,000 deer. So it is no wonder we are shunned by most of the other life forms except the mosquito.
And it is this very shunning that seems to intrigue us so much with the lives of so many of our fellow passengers on the great twirling ball. What are they doing out there hidden away from sight and sound, we ask ourselves? We imagine that they must be up to no good, and perhaps they are even plotting against us with their little animal minds.
All of which proves that along with our egos we also developed considerable insecurity.
To deal with the matter, to enable us to keep some tabs on our wild neighbors and to satisfy our curiosity about them we designed the broad field of natural science. Within this field, we adulate those who succeed in bringing us new natural facts, and in this TV day and age we give some of them time on public television. Thus we can sit as couch potatoes and observe the most intimate of natural phenomena.
But there is something quite unsatisfying about this means of learning about the other creatures. In its slickness and its warping of time to fit the constraints of television, it sometimes seems to reduce the mysteries of nature to Disney dimensions and sells the line that relating to other life is best done simply by turning a switch.
It remains to be seen what the effects of this will be on a generation that may assume that electronics and technology have stripped all of the covers away from the creatures, and there is no more mystery and fascination in their behavior than there is in animated mice.
It remains to be seen if a generation so conditioned, so familiar with life-cycle intimacies in living color, can relate to the real natural world that remains largely hidden away. In other words, will the nature walk be replaced by the ”nature sit” in front of the TV screen?
Ken Robertson, botanist with the Illinois Natural History Survey on the University of Illinois campus in Champaign, does not think so.
”I think many people are interested enough in nature to want to experience it themselves,” Robertson said. ”And once they do that they want more of it.”
”The TV show may awaken a person`s interest in nature,” Robertson said, ”but from a standpoint of personal satisfaction, there is no comparison with experiencing something yourself.”
”You can enjoy a picture of a prairie,” Robertson said, ”but if you are out there yourself with the wind blowing and the birds around, and seeing so many things, it is an experience that involves all of your senses, and no TV show or book can give you such a feeling.”
Now, in this season of tracks, the opportunity exists to pitch for the walk. As Robertson says, it is really so much more satisfying than the sit. There is a personal aspect to it, a sense that once another creature was here, and its tracks are proof that you and it share the Earth as certainly as if you walked hand-in-paw down a forest preserve trail.
Encounters with animals themselves are rare, and when they occur, the animals are most often alerted to your presence and ready to flee. Thus witnessing natural animal behavior is denied to most of us. But its record as written in snowy tracks is there like a book, a vivid account of the animal`s activity when it was going about its business undisturbed.
The fox trot is not dance as Grandma and Grandpa knew it. The fox trot is a stitching of tracks that is as purposeful in its meandering as the route of a shopping cart up and down the aisles. The small, oval paw prints, from 12 to 15 inches apart, run along the old fence rows or the forest edge as the fox hunts carefully for mice and other prey. It is as if a two-legged creature had come this way because the fox`s hind feet step in the prints left by the front feet.
If you follow the fox`s nocturnal route, you learn how it investigates the landscape as a lawyer reads a brief, seeking out the ”meat” and passing quickly along the non-productive parts.
In most areas, including some of the forest preserves, the fox shares its territory with the coyote, which leaves a very similar pattern of tracks. They can be distinguished from a dog`s tracks, usually, because of the way in which a dog tends to be less wary and purposeful in its travel.
Everyone knows deer, squirrel and rabbit tracks, and following any one of them gives a graphic demonstration of how the respective animal spends its time. Follow a deer track long enough and you will find a large oval melted into the snow where the animal spent the day, sleeping and digesting the food that it had eaten the night before.
Study a maze of rabbit tracks and you will see where the bunnies gnawed their bark dinners off the underbrush-research shows they eat the twigs and bark shoots of at least 71 species of shrubs and trees-and tried to listen for the soft and fatal swish of owl wings. Sometimes the tracks will show one of those final events, a line of rabbit tracks that ends where wings have swept fan-like indentations into the snow.
Tom Pray, naturalist at Fullersburg Woods Forest Preserve, said, ”This is a very dramatic kind of thing to see, and it impresses people and makes them realize some of what is going on.”
”A lot of people think that there isn`t much happening in nature in the winter,” Pray said, ”but all you have to do is take a walk and see all of the tracks to understand there is a lot of activity.”
There are places in the wild land that seem to be crossroads, where various tracks merge and then fan out like the spokes of a wheel. You cannot contemplate such places without marveling at the superior way in which the creatures manage their intersections. Obviously they come to them separately and methodically and pass through them without interference. There are no traffic signals or honking horns, no shaking fists or dented fenders.
Of course, if some combinations of creatures-a fox and a rabbit,for example-happen to arrive at the interesection simultaneously, the rabbit is in for what could be serious trouble. And sometimes the tracks in the snow will show such an occurrence. Then you can read the record and imagine how it must have been, and, as Pray intimated, no TV show can give you such a sense of being a part of the natural scheme of things.
Learning to read winter tracks is easy. Some of them, like the large webbed foot of the Canada goose, are unmistakable. There are a variety of publications that carry track diagrams and many nature books also include them. Personal help is also available through programs put on by the Forest Preserve District of Du Page County and the Morton Arboretum. Mary Rice is among the naturalists at the arboretum who guide outings that identify tracks. ”People are so interested and so enthusiastic about looking at tracks,” Rice said recently. ”We were out on a bitter cold day several weeks ago, and nobody even noticed the cold.”
Rice`s experience is further answer for questions posed here earlier:
Perhaps there is hope for us as a TV generation and there is indeed a recognition that viewing animal tracks on a nature walk is more meaningful and satisfying than the most colorful TV nature sit.
”I think a lot of people are interested and concerned enough to want to be personally involved,” Robertson said. ”They want nature to be a part of their lives in an active as well as a passive way.”
