Scout walk leads to 200 coyote tracks....

2.8.2010
Skykomish River Sandbar

I arrived around 9:50am. I gathered my things and then headed out over the train tracks. I paused, the sandbar and forest expanding before me, and listened. All was very quiet. I saw a robin up and to my left. He was brightly colored and sat motionless, silent. No songs, no alarms, no companion calls...I immediately dropped into my routines of invisibility and moved silently down the embankment and across the creek. I noticed old and semi-new tracks of humans, house-dogs, deer, etc. I noticed no other cars or fresh tracks to indicate other humans were present. While this location is frequented by WAS affiliates, fisherman, and a few others, today presented no others. I matched the silence of the forest, and the stillness it induced, and moved slowly changing from crouched fox-walking and crawling. I paused at every sound audible over that of the soft Southwesterly breeze. I could just start to smell the cottonwoods sweet, spring odor. I spent the next 4 hours scouting my way out onto the sand. Along the way I saw two deer gently creep away from me, analyzed a cougar track (that may have been an oddly splayed house dog, there was only one track along the path I moved along.), heard a few alarm sequences that indicated a moving coyote, and a lot of stillness and silence. There was one point that I moved along in a crouch that a female towhee hopped along side me. She never uttered a sound, but hopped quietly with me for a good while. I was curious at her curiosity in me, but acknowledged this to be a common occurrence--birds often get really curious at my "out-of-the-norm-human-movement". Shortly after the towhee, I came upon Heron pond, it was nearly dried up and I could hear movement. As I rounded the corner, it jumped and then froze with me. I could not see through the thicket in front of me (between the pond and myself) but could hear it on the far side of this oversized puddle (at this point). There was a 4 foot embankment on the far side that opened up to a thicket of scotchbroom and japanese knotweed, an area that I have had more than a dozen close encounters with coyotes. I could hear the animal moving southeast of me up into the thickets. It had a steady, slow, creeping movement. It didn't stop and start like a weasle or cat or even bird, it was a continous sneak. By the time I had snuck up to the thicket for a better view it was gone. I am guessing coyote or fox...however, what happened next still baffles me. I crept around the thicket to the southwest end of the pond, only to scare up a varied thrush. He hooked up into an alder and whistled. Swoot, swoot, swoot...came its alarm call. Crap! the first bird alarm I had set off today. This brings up a few questions: what was the animal that I startled to sneak off to the southeast? And why was there a feeding thrush only about 50 feet to the southwest of where I could hear the animal sneaking? Was the thrush making the noise the whole time? I have never heard nor seen a solo varied thrush, nor have I heard a thrush make more noise than a towhee in such a steady fashion. The varied thrush's alarm caused a few bedding deer to right (west/northwest) to sneak off into the thickets. I could hear their hoves snapping through the old knotweed stocks. The alarm also caused something to move off from the west to the southwest that alarmed a towhee and a song sparrow followed by a winter wren. When I came to part in the trail that was sand and rocks, to the west, I found two sets of deer tracks in a hurried sneak pattern follow the trail west for a bit and then moved southwest into a dense alder, cottonwood, and willow thicket. The full sandbar called my main focus at this point and I moved foward. As I exited the forest and moved onto the sand, I startled a robin. He flew south by southwest and landed in a cottonwood. It alarmed for a bit and was joined by another robin. Behind me I could hear the song sparrow and winter wren alarming too. I shook this off and decided to sit closer to the river and drink some water and eat my lunch. While I was sitting there I could see these indentions in the sand that were dark in color but at the ridges the sand had begun to dry. This line of tracks popped right out of the sand and after lunch, I got out my tooth pics, tape measure, journal, and pencil. After another hour or so, I managed to find a continuous line of 200! coyote tracks. Based on the measurements, I determined that it was a male coyote in a hunting 2x2 trot. I say hunting because at the apexes of tiny hills, it would separate it's nearly direct register which indicated to me that it was lifting its head up to look into the thickets on either side. I have seen this pattern here many times as they hunt for snowshoe hares. After finding all these tracks that seemed to cross over many older tracks, I half expected to see another set of tracks. At this time of the year I see a male coyote and a female coyote criss-crossing through the brush forcing hares out to the sneaking coyote. This was not the case today but older tracks indicated that this had occured in this very spot! Other than in the Oregon dunes, I have never found this many tracks of coyote. I have done this with deer and elk in other places in Washington, but this was my longest running trailing of a soft footed animal. My next longest trailing experience was tracking a bear for over 100 tracks along another river deeper in the foothills of the cascades.

All good medicine,
J.M. Honeywell