Tracking Challenge 3 Winners

The results of our Carnivore Tracking Challenge are in!
We asked for you to look for the most unusual sign, the clearest tracks, and the most unusual tracks of carnivores. You all did not disappoint!

Read on for tracks and sign left by owl, bobcat, and WOLVERINE!
​

The Winners
Carnivore Tracking Challenge

Category 1: The   Most unusual sign

The winner of this category is Kimber Nelson, one of the Tracking Leaders with Cascadia Wild. While the animal who left this particular sign does not belong to the order of Carnivora, a taxonomical family of mammalian carnivores, they do eat a carnivorous diet. You may be able to tell instantly who left this by showing you their telltale sign:

Owl pellets!

​Owls swallow their meals whole, and the pellet is a mass of all the indigestible contents of an owl's meal, such as fur and bones, that has been regurgitated from the gullet in a compressed ball. These particular pellets were left by a great horned owl. Great horned owls are excellent eaters and can eat a wide variety of rodents, birds, lizards, toads, and even rabbits - animals much larger than themselves!

What was so interesting about this sign was not the pellet itself but what was found in it... ​

Great horned owl, courtesy Wikipedia.

A shrew mole!

​What makes this sign unusual is that it's uncommon to see a shrew mole or their sign, despite them being common to the temperate forests of the Pacific Northwest.

Aptly named, shrew moles are evolutionarily somewhere between a shrew and a mole. They are the smallest subspecies of mole, and they dig tunnels just like a mole would, but their tunnels are usually in the litter layer of the upper surface of the dirt, or just below it, so they don't create mounds of dirt, or mole hills, like their larger mole cousins. Like moles and shrews, shrew moles eat mostly insects and other small invertebrates, which either fall into their tunnels for an easy meal or are actively hunted. They can eat prey almost as large as themselves and, like owls, they eat their meals whole. They discard only hard bits like wings, so almost no feeding sign is left behind for a tracker to spot.

The American shrew mole, courtesy of Wikipedia.

Usually the only sign you might find of a shrew mole is their remains, such as this skull. Their skulls are about half an inch long, and their teeth are all sharp and pointed - a characteristic shared by all insectivores. Despite being similarly sized and shaped, shrew mole skulls can be distinguished from shrew skulls by their white teeth that lack pigmentation. Likewise, shrew moles have a much flatter jawbone and fewer teeth than moles do. You have to look very closely - bring your magnifying glass!

Both shrews and shrew moles are commonly preyed upon by owls. Shrew moles are a tiny but an easy snack: after being spooked by a predator, they will hide in a hole or burrow, only to reemerge within a minute, prompted by their voracious hunger. One of their tactics to avoid being eaten is to taste bad, so owls, who have no sense of taste, are their primary predators.

Category 2: The clearest Tracks

The winner for the clearest carnivore tracks goes to Chris Howard, an ardent nordic skier and member of the Blues Crew, a group from the Blue Mountain Land Trust that builds and maintains trails throughout the year. He found these bobcat tracks while out skiing in the Blue Mountains. These tracks are so clear that you can even see the claws - something we don't get to see with cats very often!

Felines have protractable claws and will extend them to help gain traction, such as on steep or slippery surfaces or when running. Just because you see claws in a track, doesn't mean it's not a cat! The other clues that gave this one away are the characteristic heel pad shaped like a trapezoid and the evenly spaced toes surrounding the heel pad. Overall, the whole print makes a circular shape characteristic of all cats. In this case, the size is right for bobcat.

If you've been following along on the Tracking Challenges this winter, you might remember a beautiful photo of a bobcat shown here. Well, Ray Anderson and Kathleen Baker once again caught a bobcat in their West Portland yard - this time on their trail cam! It's so great to see that their neighborhood is supporting so much diversity!

And, that's not all. We also have a big-cat related honorable mention for Amanda Ferguson, a longtime volunteer with a keen eye who is always finding interesting sign while out checking cameras or doing a fox or wolf survey. This time, she found what may be sign of a mountain lion kill and bobcat feeding, over on the east side of Mt. Hood National Forest.

Both of the deer carcasses shown above look like they may have been dragged to where they lay. This is a feat only for large carnivores like mountain lions and bears. However, in both instances, it seems the larger carnivore didn't get to stay around to enjoy their meal. If they had, less of the skeleton would be intact, instead parts of it would be crushed to get to the tasty marrow in the bones. However, both carcasses are picked completely clean, suggesting that a midsize carnivore such as a bobcat, coyote, or even a smaller carnivore like a raccoon or raven may have been at work here.

In the second photo, we have an additional clue: a lot of deer hair surrounds the skeleton. Canines don't tend to be picky, but felines will remove the hair of an animal before they eat it, and so this is likely that a bobcat fed on this deer. We may never know for sure, but it can be interesting to search for the evidence and try to piece it all together.

In either case, hopefully there is a bear or cougar out there who is finally getting to enjoy a hard-earned meal!

Category 3: The most unusual Tracks

This final category is also one that may, for many, be the most exciting!
While out adventuring in the Wallowas, Graham Hulbert, also a Cascadia Wild Tracking Leader, came upon tracks left by a WOLVERINE! 

Wolverines are able to stay on top of snow, thanks to their large feet that act like snowshoes. Their feet are so large, you might even mistake their tracks for a bear, an animal much larger and heavier. Their tracks measure about 3 5/8 - 6 inches long by 3 1/4 - 5 1/2 inches wide, and the tracks above are right in that realm. Wolverine's feet are also heavily furred, another adaptation for snow, which can make their tracks look somewhat indistinct or melted out, even though they may be fairly fresh. Wolverines, like other mustelids (martens, minks, weasels, otters, and so on), have five toes on each foot, and their heel pad is shaped like an upside down U. Their claws are semi-retractable; like bobcats they are used for traction - or even for grasping prey - and they may not show in their tracks. 

Wolverines also typically move in a lope, which is an energy efficient, slower gallop. Since their legs are short and their feet are large, there is often not much space between the individual footfalls relative to their body length. The trail shown in the photo below shows the groupings of a lope: the left front foot falls first, followed by the right front and then the left hind almost falling on top of each other, and ends with the right hind at the top of the group. Then, the motion repeats in this pattern, which is called a 3x4 lope, the most common gait for a wolverine to use. The length of each of these groups is about 2-3 feet, which is just right for wolverine, too. 

​​These tracks likely belong to Oregon's only known wolverine, nicknamed Stormy. Although other wolverines have been documented here and there in Oregon over the years, Stormy is the only confirmed wolverine to be residing here. He was the first to take up official residence since the 1930s, when wolverines were made locally extinct through fur trapping.

What we know about Stormy is thanks to the hard work of the Wallowa Wolverine Project. First documented in 2011, Stormy has consistently been documented each year since, and most reliably in springtime. The same year he was first documented, two additional wolverines were also documented in the Wallowas, but have not been seen since.

Stormy is recognizable by his distinct, lighter colored chest markings, called a gular patch. All wolverines have a gular patch, and no two are alike, so this patch acts like their unique fingerprint. Researchers get wolverines to show off their gular patch with what's called a runpole setup, where a platform is placed in front of a camera with bait hung above. The wolverine (and often other animals like black bears, martens, and even foxes and mountain lions) stands on the platform and stretches up toward the bait revealing their torso. This setup also allows researchers to tell the sex of each individual, along with other characteristics like whether a female is nursing during kit rearing season. Usually, there are also wire-brush snaggers on the platform that collect hair samples for genetic analysis, giving further insight into the individuals that visit.

Stormy standing on a runpole setup, showing his torso and distinctive gular patch. From Wallowa Wolverine Project.

While Stormy may be the only wolverine known in the Wallowas, wolverines can cover incredible distances in their day to day wanderings and as they disperse to new territories. It's not unlikely that wolverines will one day disperse from Idaho to the Blue Mountains, or other parts of Oregon, just as Stormy has done. 

This hope is dear to Cascadia Wild, as we started the Wolverine Tracking Project almost 20 years ago to confirm reports of wolverine sightings on Mt. Hood. Whether these tracks belong to Stormy, or whether they may be sign of a new wolverine in town, we have goosebumps thinking about encountering something like this in the wild! Indeed, to many, wolverines symbolize the large expanse of wilderness on which they depend. Stormy's continued presence in the Wallowas attests to the strength and richness of this ecosystem and its suitability to support other wolverines, while supporting the hope of the wolverine's return to their historical range.

You can learn more about Stormy and the Wallowa Wolverine Project by following their Instagram:  @WallowaWolverineProject.
And check out their recent 2019-2020 Wallowa Wolverine Report: Wolverine Persistence in Oregon's Wallowa Mountains.

Stormy, the Wolverine of the Wallowas. From Wallowa Wolverine Project.

Thanks for joining us this winter for our first ever round of Tracking Challenges. We hope to do more in the future. In the meantime, feel free to share with us your exciting discoveries or to send us your questions. If you're in the Portland area, check out our monthly Tracking Club. And whatever you do:

Keep on Tracking!