Back on track....s

Snow on the ground can tell you a lot about what's going on.... provided you can follow the tracks.

We've recently blogged about the hare that came past.... but there were more traces of animal and bird activity to tell us who was around.

Vole tracks under the snow....

The first was some strange lines in the snow near the lime tree.... the crust of the snow had been pushed up and cracked. These were caused by a rodent seeking food under the snow... most probably a vole. There were other tracks on the surface there... definately caused by a field mouse out on the hunt for food.
How do we know the difference? Well, voles tend to create runs in the long grass and thick vegetation... mice tend to keep to the clearer spaces.... so our thoughts are directed by their behaviour. Why were we certain about the mouse... splayed back feet prints and a drag line from the tail.

...Mice above [it hops more than walks].

We could see the tracks of the moorhens, forced to plod from the bief to the feeder out in the field, the slight strip of webbing each side of the toes giving a distinct chubbiness to the print. The pheasants, also around the feeder, had their own pattern... a sharper, slimmer toe line with a longer rear toe... and a drag mark from the tail. Also... they tend to hurry, not plod, so the print has rough edges with traces of snow spread over the undisturbed crust.

A fox trotting... paw marks inline.

We had a fox that came into the bottom corner of the verger, did a short circuit toward the bief and returned almost the same route and over the fence... those tracks were totally different from the coypu [ragondin] tram lines where they had journeyed in convoy from the bief to the fence line... where longer grass had left pockets of vegetation exposed.

The coypu rocks along as it walks...

... here though you can see the lines caused by two tails...
a pair of youngsters went along here [the other tracks are hare].

But perhaps the most vivid was the little vole hole in the snow with a trail of footprints leading from it....

The vole hole is at the top... just beside a line of pheasant tracks.
You can see that these tracks are very different from those left by a field mouse.

You can see the hole here at the right... 
you can also see the toes in the pheasant track.

We followed and found why they hadn't returned... it had become supper for an owl.

The final moments...
the vole track is coming in at the top...
the owl struck from the  bottom right...
the pit is where the feet grabbed the vole...
the wings pushed into the snow as it lifted off to the top left...
and there is a slight disturbance of the snow beyond the wing prints...
probably caused by by the vole's body bumping on the crust.

Like we said... you can learn a lot about who is around and what they are doing.

Hare today

The hare was moving right to left...

Either the cold weather is making the creatures more venturesome, or it's just the snow revealing where they have passed. This morning we awoke to find an unmistakeable set of Hare (Lepus europaeus) lièvre tracks passing our front door.

Coming towards the camera
If you look closely at the first set of prints,
you can see the rear right paw mark clearly at the bottom of the hole.

A hare, travelling at some speed, crossed the bridge from the meadow, and accelerated around the end of the barn to the proto-hedge where it could cross the road. Each set of pawprints is a single splodge in the snow, with the two front feet in line at the back. The huge back feet pass the front feet as the hare bounds along, landing splayed out to either side.

Here, the hare's front feet are at the back and the orangy splodges, just above the front elbows, are the hind feet overtaking!

Hares are hunted for the pot throughout France and elsewhere. In our community of communes the hunting fraternity is performing a comptages(census) of hares because of concerns about the population, believed to be declining rapidly (more by habitat loss than from predation). The season for hares was 25 September to 4 December last year, so our hares can bounce in peace for the time being.

Here is that paw print again.

Winter is here

The meteo has been predicting snow for some while, with an amber alert for today - so much so that Meteociel's server was struggling to cope with the load. At about 2pm today it started to snow - very fine, wet snow (snizzle?), just a few flakes at a time at first. Although the temperature was a degree or two above freezing, the snow quickly began to settle, and by 5:30pm there was a light covering.

Grandmont behind a curtain of falling snow

Now (9:30pm) we have about 2cm, although the weather station registers zero precipitation. Either we've had less than 0.3mm of liquid, or the snow is just too fine for the rain gauge to register.

We also have a red-legged partridge  (alectoris rufa) perdrix rouge sitting on the front doorstep. It didn't fly away when Tim opened the door to offer it a handful of bird food. It just ambled a couple of metres away from the door and returned to pick up the grain. This rather odd photo was taken with flash switched off, so as not to disturb the bird's digestion. The background is our crushed limestone path, with blobs of snow.

Can I come in for a warm?