With fresh snow just about every day, I have to go check the fresh tracks. I leave the yard on my skidder trail and see where the grosbeaks crossbills or pine siskins must have shelled the pine tree tips all afternoon. Pine cone parts are everywhere. A deer came to look at the same mess as me and Some of the deer trails make no human sense to me, but the deer for some reason known only to them at any given moment will dip under balsam branches that literally hang to the ground. Maybe it's the deer's way of getting a free back scratch, in any case, they do it more often than I ever imagined. I pick any deer tracks and because of the way they roam it always takes me to the next critter in the winter wonderland. Today I found Weasels and the two footed hop, hop, hop that suddenly disappear in a quarter sized hole in the snow usually just before a clump of covered grass or a fallen tree, sometimes next to a stump, then another hole opens up and the tracks start to scamper away or around. The tracks look like the weasels are having fun but I would hate to be the mouse that comes around its snow tunnel and runs into one of those small fur coats. Then this little scurrying set of tracks gets up on a bunny run belonging to the snow shoe hares that have their routes packed down. No hilly nilly wandering like the deer here, four feet stomped and from both the coming and goings, you never really can tell which way is home or the brush pile there headed for, or away from, and any new snow they must run the rabbit highways just to make sure there completely open and accessible to every bunny in the underbrush. So I keep walking with the snow depth not to deep and without snow shoes on my own feet I think it's so different walking the woods in November. With what seems like a cloud in the sky that runs a month in length. Wow how everything in the last two weeks, froze, frosted or got a blanket of snow that won't be lifted for what stops me in my tracks, five more months. I got a lot of tracking ahead of me. The trout whisperer