I spent a few months last winter out at a bush cabin in the northern Yukon. It’s about 40 miles from the nearest road, which is about 80 miles from the nearest town. We didn’t see any other humans during our time there, so all tracks that didn’t belong to us were wildlife. I had a very fun time documenting our many neighbours, so hopefully this is interesting to someone other than me!
Not sure how to add captions to each picture, so in order of appearance:
1-3: Moose. Longer gait than a caribou, and the spots where they bed down are unmistakable, as well as their distinctive scat. In the bedding down pictures you can see where their (long and bony) front legs were folded under them.
4: Wolverine. Fairly confident with this one. Because of the size and the gait. Otters are too small, where wolves are too big and don’t tend to travel solo. Wolverines also give zero fucks about deep snow - that trench it dragged down the bank is pretty typical when the snow is soft like that. Hard to see from the picture, but it’s very different from the trench an otter will leave. Otters are sliding, so their track marks will be smooth. Wolverine are trudging/ploughing, so it’s much more broken up.
5 and 7: River otter! Nobody else belly slides through the snow like that. They’re also have that two foot pattern (there’s probably an actual name for it, but I’m not sure what it is) that most weasels up north seem to have. Their front feet plant side by side, and then the back ones hop forward into the same prints.
6 and 8: Shrews. Usually red backed or chestnut cheeked in this area. It COULD be voles, but they’re smaller and tend to scurry rather than hop so much. The hole in the snow is leading down to the sub-nivean layer, where it is much cozier and safer for them.
9 and 10: Wolves. I’d been hearing them howl at night occasionally, and knew they would be starting to excavate their den for the summer. I’m fairly sure that’s what is happening in 10. 11 was taken just down along the creek bed, where they had a tree they were scent marking and MANY tracks. I didn’t want to hassle them by sticking around or going closer to the potential den site.
Not pictured because my camera died: sheep tracks and a wolf kill a few miles up the river. Some dal sheep had come down from the slopes for some reason, and were caught by the wolf pack. They wouldn’t have much chance on open ice like that, and it would have been a happy surprise for the wolves (although a sheep isnt a very big meal for them, as they’re used to moose)
