Animal Tracking: Black Bear Scat

One scoop of peach bear poop please! In a cup not a cone. ;)

Here is a blop of scat nobody coulda' missed while walking down the remote gravel road... it almost looked like one of those rubber joke poops, but upon a closer look I could see it had fruit skins in it (and not the usual joke corn).

Also it was very, very fresh and only the baking sun had darkened the very thin exterior.

The longer I sat there examining it, the more evidence that appeared - not just in the poop but on the wind. I smelled something strong and skunky... I tended to think it was a skunk, until my donkey's behavior began to change to something nervous and agressive, something frightened.

I broke the scat open to see it just fell apart, fresh, warm, and strong smelling. FULL of fruit...

10 feet away from the scat was a tall peach tree with tons of little half rotted peaches on the ground.

If I was a bear in the Fall season, I would stand guard near the last peaches of the year too. JuJu the donkey let me know under no uncertain terms that there was a bear in the area by looking up into the forested area over and over, alert, freaked out, and tried forcing me to run away with her by jumping, running back and forth, making huge eyes. When she realized i was not going to run she gave up on my stupid human self and she took off running alone! I found out where she was when i got a call from a neighbor that she was grazing their lawn.

Are humans less aware then they used to be... or are we that arrogent that we don't fear wild animals anymore, even unarmed? Why don't our instincts force us running, but instead thinking?

Xoxoxox

Animal Tracking: Bobcat & Wild Turkey

Can hardly see it huh? Neither could I. As I was walking I began to stare to my right at the smooth clay & silt where rain had drained down the side of a mountain road, I imagined how nice some tracks would look in that perfectly smooth mud...
then I saw it.
Bobcat tracks.
One after another in a staight line, wide apart and shaped with such perfection that it left no doubt as to what had left it. No claw marks, large pads, feline shape... (see track info & drawings HERE)....
A bobcat moving upward along the road, moving towards some turkey feathers and...

...wild turkey tracks (see pic below)! You can almost see the scene unfolding, like a dream of something to happen, already happened, to always happen. The hunt. The cat trailing the bird in hunger, in play and power.

Xoxoxo

Animal Tracking: Black Bear Scat?

While me and JuJu the donkey were on one of our walks I came upon this scat (poop) in the gravel road. I knew right away it was not raccoon scat, bird scat, or deer scat because of the shape...
it had some round berries in it and didn't look hairy so I felt perplexed as to whether it might be coyote scat either.
Fox? A bit of black bear poop? Opossum?
Following scat descriptions, I know that canine's have poop that gets pointy on the ends and bobcats have a tubular shape too - deer and rabbit poop comes out in pellets (rabbit's having a more dry, flat, & separated look, deer being a bigger wet pile of pellets), wild turkey scat looks like a big bird poop with the white mixed in. Raccoon's look like alot of lil' cylinder tubes of poop, and opossums are kinda like a coyote poop that has bumps strung together....
*
This left me with one choice... a choice I smelled about 50 feet down the road....
A Black BEAR!
Further down the way I smelled a strong odor, one that was like skunky urine. I immediately knew it was a bear, I assume from some deep biological part of my brain that carries primitive instincts cause I have not seen a bear urinate & then sniffed it after. It's something you just know when it blows into your nose. A bear smells like no other animal and it's generally skunky stinky dread locked dirty pungent aroma can't be missed.
*
Now I realize, the bear has been hanging all around my cabin, this poop with these berries in it are everywhere in the woods.
XOxoxo

(Not) Trespassing: The Blue Shack

Decay doesn't have to take 100 years, sometimes just in your own life span humans can build things, and watch their tiny personal empire fall to pieces. There's always a hidden story, a mini drama, a loss, forgotten time or sometimes a death these places hold onto... but for the blue shack not very much longer.

Ya might notice there isn't any No Trespassing signs on this property, and that is because it is for sale - under $100,000 with 13 acres! ( If you want to know where it's located in Western North Carolina, send me an email.)

The house is caving in. Literally. Porch posts leaning into a V shape, if you step on the covered porch floor boards your foot will go through it. Windows are broken, wood is bending, pieces of the roof are falling off.... yet it still holds it's bright blue spirit, you can still read some of the dreams that were afloat when it was built.

The back of the house pushes up to a rather steep hill, which is probably why the blue paint has washed off, the wall is pushing outward under the weight of the roof.... even a piece of the whole back wall has opened up and a freakin' lawn chair is poking out! Somehow that is creepy.

Peeking into the windows, I didn't find much on the inside of the house --- the usual anticipation to see something beautiful in it's last run of decay was not really even there...

Unless you feel a toilet seat is beautiful....

The ceiling is peeling off in sheets, which shows the rafters.... the rafters are the only thing about the structure that still looks stable. "Stable" being used real loosely.

Since there was 13 more acres of mystery to explore, I set off up the long winding road that led back up the side of the mountain. Plants & wildlife abound...

EDIBLE, MEDICINAL, and NATIVE PLANTS :::::::::

The Fiddle Head Fern... Edible when it first shoots up in the spring.Raspberries!!! Mmmmmm - the berries will pop out those hairy shells....

Blackberries ..... about to be ripe!

Woodland Nettles and Jewelweed growing in patches together.... ( so if the nettles sting you, you can put the jewelweed on your skin to sooth it!)

Pokeberry.... not yet ready to use for dye, but the white flowers turn into dark purple berries. You can eat the young plant in the spring, but not the berries or the mature plant (although i have heard people debate this!)

Bloodroot! My favorite native plant eva' ! The root is used for dye and medicine.

Mountain Mint?? Some kind of minty, menthol, bee balm smelling herb that grows in the woods here....

More HUMAN STUFF :::::::

In places along the road there was old fencing, from when this land was most likely a pasture with some type of domesticated animal... I have heard stories from locals about how their parents or grandparents made pasture by digging around & cutting roots of trees then having them pulled by mules out the ground. That's a shit ton of work!
There was also a small hidden barn, with wide open slats --- it was totally covered in thorny wild roses making it impossible for me to go inside or get near it!

In a lil' nook I saw this cinder block built contraption, that upon closer examination I realized was an old spring water box....

I would not be drinking the water from this thing anymore- it was full of mud and I did not see water in it... either that spring has run dry or the box was old enough to have a leak down below.

ANIMAL EVIDENCE::::::

Even though there had been a big huge rain storm just last night, I still found a few bits of evidence left by the wildlife on that property.

First, coyote scat (poop) totally rained on so hard that most the poop part was gone and all that was left was the huge hair glob left from the little critters it had eaten.

Then a fresh deer track in the mud, it slid a little downward because of the steep part of the path...

right next to the deer track was a patch of jewelweed (see the pic below) that the tops of the plants were eaten off....

THE ROAD ENDS :::::::::

The long long long road ended at the top of a ridge, which behind the trees you could see lots of mountains.

On my way back down I stopped to take a pic with the rocks being exposed from the erosion along the road... I LOVE big funky rocks! ANd I loooooove (not) trespassing. :)

XOxoxoox

Animal Tracking: The Appalachian Mountain Lion

That is one BIG padded paw! About the size of a large canine, but without the tell tale claw marks dogs leave behind (a distinct hole over each pad even in shallow dirt because dog, fox and coyote claws are not retractable.) A track without the claw holes is a feline track, and because these tracks were deep in the mud and there were at least several to look at all without canine claw mark --- I believe these are tracks made by the rarely seen, elusive, almost extinct and hotly debated Native Mountain Lion!

Some other signs that a mountain lion passed through by my cabin are during that week these tracks appeared my cat (a domestic cat named Toots) was terrified to go outside at night (and during the day) - I found more tracks down by my garden, all following along the path of the creek downward on the mountain. Also in this area where the tracks were, the deer tracks that normally were all over there disappeared for a time.

People in the appalachian mountains have argued for quite some time whether the Mountain Lion of the area was completely extinct now or whether a few remained well hidden - I have heard stories from a handful of reliable people who have seen the western north carolina mountain lion ( chasing a wolf in the snow in Brevard, through binolculars during a deer hunt in Hot Springs, gracefully hopping a fence at the top of a ridge in Marshall, sitting outside a chicken farm's large coop in Marshall...) --->

As for myself, aside from seeing these amazing tracks pictured here - 5 years ago in Weaverville, NC far back in the woods off Reems Creek Rd. around 3 a.m. I heard the scream of the mountain lion on top the ridge behind the little house I was staying - exactly as people describe it sounded like a woman screaming a blood curdling scream but was unmistakably an animal. It was chill inducing, and made it so I could not fall back to sleep- I knew exactly what it was when I heard it.

Another interesting twist on these tracks, was this was the same place I found what I thought were bobcat tracks... although those were washed away with the rain, a new set of bobcat sized tracks were only 7-10 feet away from these large feline tracks - possibly it could be a cub of the mountain lion and not a bobcat? That would be awesome. :)

What do you think? The "Painter" as the old timers called it was a feared animal, and between people shooting them on sight out of fear and the wiping out of deer at one point led to this now mysterious status for the native puma...

Do you believe they are still here?

After seeing these tracks behind my cabin, I do.

XOXOxox RRrrroar!

Animal Tracking: Bobcat... Coyote or Fox?

Finding tracks by a canine is pretty common, and usually easy to identify because their claws show up in the print above the toes...

the deal is, bobcat prints are very similar to that of a coyote, dog or even a fox --->
They all have 4 toes and a pad underneath, the main indicator that separates the bobcat/large feline from the canine is the claws that show up. It is rare I find a bobcat print (maybe once in my life) and the pics i took here in my muddy bog don't appear to have claws. But what do ya'll think? Bobcat? Canine? (Or maybe the infamous and disbelieved local mountain lion?)

Pictured in the black and white drawing below are a rendering of bobcat prints::::




The mammal print above is a coyote and the one below is a common fox. You can see both leave distinct claw marks in their tracks.
The track you see below is the second track, ahead of the one in the first two pictures - appeared to be a stride. These tracks were large, only a tad bit smaller then ones I have seen from a large domesticated Pit Bull Dog. Get guessing!!!!

Xoxoxo ROar! Woof! puuurrrrrr!

Animal Tracking: Itty Bitty Birdie Feet & Mystery Trail

Tiny bird tracks! Aren't they cute? There is a perfect area a little ways behind the Luck Cabin that is all muddy, mushy and bog like - many creeks branch and converge in this area making it a tiny wetland that attracts alot of animals & birds. The cool part is they all leave perfectly shaped tracks in the smooth wet silt.
This second track looks more like a slither... but I am not certain that it is a snake trail? The slither track is coming up out the water of the creek, in a spot that is shallow and slow moving.

What do you think it is? Can anyone give a positive ID on this meandering track...
Xoxox