*Jamie Nack with Wood Turtle (photo courtesy of Jamie Nack)*

In this episode, we answer questions like "do animals cover their tracks?" and learn about how animals with bare tails handle winter weather with our tracks expert, Extension Senior Wildlife Outreach Specialist, Jamie Nack!

Subscribe to QuACK on Spotify, iHeart Radio, Apple Podcasts, or your favorite podcast app!

Transcription

Hey, and welcome to Questions Asked by Curious Kids or QuACK, a podcast made by Southern Wisconsin Bird Alliance. This is a podcast where we gather questions about nature from kids to be answered with a local expert. My name is Mickenzee; I'm an educator, and I'll be the host for this series. This episode I'll be interviewing Jamie Nack, an Extension Senior Wildlife Outreach Specialist at UW – Madison. Oh, that's a long title. Today she'll be answering questions all about tracks. Okay, let's jump in with Jamie.

-----

Mickenzee: Alright. Hey, Jamie. Welcome to the show. Before we get started with the questions from the kids, could you tell us about what you do here at UW Madison?

Jamie: Sure. So my name is Jamie Nack. My title, I'm an Extension Wildlife Outreach Specialist in the Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology at UW Madison. Huge, long title, right? But I'll come back to that extension piece. So most folks are familiar with the University of Wisconsin, Madison doing research and also teaching our next professionals, so undergraduate and graduate teaching. And so there's a third branch of work that's done at the university and that is extension work. And that work is basically taking research and our findings and sharing it with people off the UW Madison campus.

Mickenzee: Ohhh!

Jamie: And so for my work, I get to work around the theme of wildlife ecology, and I do a lot of work off campus working with private landowners, working with kids, working with adults and sharing the love of wildlife, helping to answer their problems and helping them to coexist with wildlife and pique their interest, and attracting more wildlife to their properties and their backyards. So that's the extension side. And then I do get to do some formal teaching in the Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology for our students who are majoring in wildlife.

Mickenzee: Yeah, which happened to be me a couple years ago. So your job is like you're the bridge between the university and the community.

Jamie: Yeah, exactly.

Mickenzee: Very cool! Sounds like a really awesome job but maybe I'm a little biased because I also love teaching. Today's questions are all about tracks. Can you track when you first became interested in wildlife?

Jamie: Oh, that's a great question, way to play into the topic. So for me, I have what was a pretty traditional route, you know, decades ago into this profession, and that is through my time afield, particularly with my father and also just growing up outdoors, out in the country. We lived with the river in our backyard, and I was constantly turning over rocks and, you know, investigating things and looking for animals and paying attention using binoculars. All of those fun things. So I really spent a lot of time outdoors, but my connection with wildlife really came in as my dad started taking me hunting with him. And so it seems kind of odd to think about hunting and love for wildlife in the same sentence. But what hunting did was really put me out in the field and made me a keen observer and not just the animal I was pursuing, but I learned and saw a lot of other wildlife that had me questioning and asking, you know, what do they eat? Where do they sleep? How many young do they have? Just all these crazy questions were popping in my mind. And so through that experience, I really had a lot of questions, but you know, I've gained a strong interest in wildlife ecology. So how wildlife interact with the habitats, with other animals, with people and so on. So then I started to really ask questions about management, you know, how do we manage wildlife and that often took me into visiting with the local department of Natural Resource biologists and seeing what work they were up to. And anyway, long story short, I knew from a pretty early stage I would say oh probably by a junior in high school, that I really wanted to pursue being a wildlife biologist. And the rest is sort of, history, so to speak. So I pursued an undergraduate degree and then a master's degree. And, again, get to kind of combine my love of teaching and wildlife. On a daily basis.

Mickenzee: Awesome! Yeah that spark from childhood really sets your path.

Jamie: It does.

Mickenzee: Yeah I also hunted when I was in middle school with my grandpa and like, being out in nature that early and for that long, you really get to observe stuff that, you know, sometimes just going for a hike doesn't allow you to do.

Jamie: So true, so true.

Mickenzee: Okay our first question is, are there any animals that try to cover their tracks to maybe sneak up on prey or hide from predators?

*Rabbit tracks in the snow (photo by USFWS)*

Jamie: I absolutely love this question because animals are pretty savvy, wildlife you know, they're trying to survive every minute of their life. So they do things pretty intentionally. However, I can't think of any situations where an animal is, you know, capable or smart enough to think to go back and cover, sift out their tracks so they can't be seen. So I can't think of any situations that way, but the question got me thinking about some other ways that animals avoid having a predator follow their tracks. And if we think about cottontail rabbits, they're a pretty common prey species, lots of things like to eat rabbits, anywhere from a fox or a coyote, or maybe an owl or, red tailed hawk. And so a couple things that rabbits do is when they run away, they run in a very zigzag pattern, so they don't run in a straight line, but also, I don't know that rabbits do this necessarily to avoid predation, but more stay in their local habitat that they're familiar with. But they also tend to run in circles. And so they will go out and then circle back on their tracks. And so if you're a fox or a coyote, it might be confusing if they're running back on the same tracks, but I don't know whether rabbits are smart enough to be doing that intentionally, or if it's also a matter of just staying in their home range, the place, the location where they're the most comfortable and they keep circling back to it. But either way, it can certainly be confusing to a predator.

Mickenzee: That’s so interesting. I'll have to watch and notice for that next time I see a rabbit running away.

Jamie: Absolutely.

Mickenzee: Our next question is probably a tricky one to answer, I imagine. How can you tell if small tracks are from a small animal or if they're from a baby animal?

Jamie: Again, a super great question. And there's a couple of things we can think about where we would want to pause and take notice. So you're out there in the woods, you come across maybe a stream and a soft spot in the mud where you see some tracks and they look pretty small. And that's where this question comes from. How do I know if that's a baby animal or an adult animal? You can start kind of working your inner detective and start thinking, well, what time of the year is it? So if this is in the fall, we know that a lot of baby animals are born in the spring, right? So by fall they are probably at least half adult size, maybe more, depending on the individual species. So the timing might really give us a clue if it was in the spring and we saw that little track and we were thinking, oh, maybe that's a baby, it could be because of the timing. So maybe then you want to look around a little bit more, see how long you can follow that track. And as you follow that track, do you see larger tracks with it where you've got an adult? Because typically, not all wildlife but many wildlife species, the young will be nearby for things like raccoons and possums and things like that. But in other situations, like a deer, you might see the fawn track but not see the adult doe. She may be elsewhere right now, and vice versa.

Mickenzee: I think of turtles too, they don’t really have parents taking care of them.

Jamie: Yes! That's right. Great example. Yeah the turtle, the female turtle lays the eggs and then the nest is kind of on its own. She doesn't, you know, defend the nest, protect the nest. But when they hatch, then they hatch in numbers. So yeah that's another, another great question. So after you give some thought to the time of the year and you follow the tracks as long as you can to see if there's maybe adults with it, or it was an adult and there's even tinier tracks.

Mickenzee: That would be a fun surprise!

*Deer Track (photo by Dane County Land & Water Resources Department)*

Jamie: Right? The other things we do then to try to figure out whose track it is, what animal left that track, is to then look at patterns or shapes of that track. We might be looking at the gait, so the overall the hind foot to the front foot, you know, what does that spacing look like. And then we start to look at things like the number of toes. So if you saw that track and you counted the toes and it was something less than 4 or 5, you're probably looking at a deer because deer have two. Deer also have a heart shape to them. And the bottom of the heart is pointing in the direction of travel.

Mickenzee: Yeah!

Jamie: So that's something you can think about and go and check out for yourself next time you're out in the woods. But if you're counting and you're seeing an animal with 4 or 5 toes, if it has four on the front foot and the hind foot, you're looking at either a canid, so a member of the dog family, or a felid, a member of the cat family.

Mickenzee: Oh, okay.

Jamie: The tricky part is, depending on where you are, and especially if you're in an urban area or a more populated area at County Park River, we've got other dogs and cats besides the wild one, so domestic animals are also going to kind of throw that wrinkle in there that we need to make sure to consider them too. But when you look at those toes, if you see tiny little triangles above the toes, little indents, those are likely claws. And so you will see claws registered in soft sand or mud. And that's an indication of a canid, a member of the dog family, a coyote or a fox, maybe. If you don't see that, then it's more likely that it's a member of the felid family, the cat family, because they have the retractable claws.

Mickenzee: Yes.

Jamie: And so in that case, you know, in Wisconsin, the bobcat would be the most common felid. We occasionally, but very rarely, have mountain lions roaming through the state, not likely to be in more populated areas, more rural areas. So that's another possibility. And then of course, if you're getting into animals with five toes, then we're starting to look at things like squirrels, members of the weasel family, lots of different options there too.

Mickenzee: And our last question is about tails. So they notice that a lot of animals leave tail drags, especially if you're looking like in the snow. And how do animals not get cold when their tails drag into the snow? Like that muskrat example, it’s got that naked tail.

*Muskrat tracks with tail drag (photo by USFWS)*

Jamie: Right? So we can go back to a couple other life history characteristics for wildlife. So we're in Wisconsin, it does get cold, we do get snow, and not all wildlife are adapted to surviving our winters. So there are three different strategies that wildlife take. One would be they migrate, so they leave the area, or they leave the state for somewhere warmer. That is often the case with animals that eat insects, because we don't have insects active in the winter so they have to fly south where they don't have the cold temperatures and they can forage on insects. Another adaptation would be to hibernate like a chipmunk or a ground squirrel. Black bears also have a type of hibernation, we won't get into all the science behind it but they also sleep for periods of the winter as well. So those are two strategies, and then the third strategy is to be adapted or built, to handle that cold. And so you mentioned the muskrat, beavers would be another example, otters, mink, those are all furbearers. So mammals that have fur and are active in the wintertime. Oftentimes they're swimming in open areas of frozen lakes where they can get access in and out or they're tucked away in their beaver lodges and they've got a food stash, or cache, underneath the water. And essentially that fur that they have, some of them have fur on their tail some do not, but fur acts as an insulator. And for those animals I just mentioned, they have two types of fur on their body. They have guard hairs and then they have underfur and the underfur is what keeps them warm. And then the guard hair is what kind of lets that water slide off their back. That, along with oil glands that they use to groom themselves, it puts oil on those guard hairs, and it helps that water just repel right off of their fur. But the tail specifically animals also have adaptations when it is cold that their body can basically shut off the needs of their extremities for staying warm, essentially, and focus that energy on their core organs, their core vitals. And so they can almost like shunt off that access to the tail to be able to survive.

Mickenzee: So their tails aren't as sensitive, maybe.

Jamie: Yeah. Good way to put it. But then in some cases they actually have heavy fur on those tails that keep them warm as well. One interesting note. The possum, the Virginia Opossum right, is a species that is active year-round. Typically we didn't see possum in northern Wisconsin, but it's one of the species we're kind of watching with a warming climate that they may move further north. What we see in possum, though, is they're not super adapted for those cold temperatures and so they often do get frostbite on their ears or on their tails. So it's not uncommon to see a possum with the tip of its ear missing or tip of its tail. And so that's an example of an animal that isn't necessarily suited for our cold winters, but is starting to move its distribution further north with warming weather, so pretty interesting.

Mickenzee: That is really interesting.

*Virginia Opossum in the snow (photo by USFWS)*

Jamie: But they sometimes get brought in to wildlife rehabilitators to get taken care of if they get an extreme weather event or winter weather.

Mickenzee: Right, right. They also have like naked hands and feet.

Jamie: Yeah.

Mickenzee: Oh man, poor opossums. All right. I feel like I learned so much today outside of just tracks too. We're learning about all kinds of animals. And thank you to the Lincoln third graders for submitting your nature questions. And thanks, Jamie, for teaching us today.

Jamie: You are very welcome. Keep asking questions and seeking answers.

-----

If you are interested in learning more or getting involved with our programs, please head to our website swibirds.org and check out the free lessons, games and activities. Check out things like our rubber tracks and free downloadable urban mammal track and Scat ID. If you have a big nature question that you'd like to have answered, please have a grown up or teacher submit your question to info@swibirds.org with the title ‘Questions for QuACK’. Make sure to include your grade and school you attend so I can give you a shout out.

Thanks for tuning in and I hope you join us next time on QuACK!

Check out SoWBA’s free lessons, games, and activities!⁠

⁠Get out and explore nature with us!

Make a donation to Southern Wisconsin Bird Alliance

Audio Editing by Mickenzee Okon

Transcription by Juanita Duarte

Logo design by Carolyn Byers and Kaitlin Svabek

Music: “The Forest and the Trees” by Kevin MacLeod