photography – Vermont Master Naturalist Program

By Leslie Spencer, VMN Lower Winooski participant 2024

An Immense World

Lately, I’ve been reading An Immense World by Ed Yong. It’s been a refreshing antidote to doomscrolling about whatever he-who-shall-not-be-named is up to today. Every page of his book draws you deeper into mesmerizing stories about non-human perception, revealing how astonishingly diverse sensory experiences can be across the animal kingdom.

We humans rely on five senses—sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch—to navigate the world. These senses shape where we feel safe, how we determine what’s edible, and more. We just never really think about it that way. Yong challenges us to step outside of our sensory bubble to imagine the world through the experiences of other creatures.

Did you know that butterflies taste with their feet? That mallard ducks have a 360-degree field of vision? That catfish are essentially swimming tongues with taste receptors all over their bodies? Or that flowers reveal hidden patterns visible to bees but invisible to us?

Page after page, Yong illustrates how each animal has its own sensory world—its umwelt (or umwelten, plural)—often existing beyond our human comprehension.

Tuning into the umwelten around me today

One of Yong’s key points is that animals aren’t deficient for lacking senses we have—they’ve simply evolved to perceive the world in ways that meet their own unique needs. Take bees, for example: they can’t see red the way we do, but they can see ultraviolet light. For bees, this reveals unique patterns on flower petals, invisible to us, that guide them to nectar, which is sugar that provides them with the energy to fly.

Today, I had the chance to tune into the umwelten of the creatures I share the city of Burlington with. As part of the Vermont Master Naturalist program, I joined Alicia Daniel and Sophie Mazowita for a winter field day focused on wildlife tracking and tree identification.

We couldn’t have asked for better conditions. A few inches of fresh powder fell overnight, with the snow tapering off just before sunrise. Around 10am, under a gorgeous bluebird sky, Burlington was shimmering as bits of snow gently blew loose from the treetops. We set out into the woods at Leddy Park, and later Ethan Allen Homestead, eager to see which creatures had left tracks for us to find in the fresh snow over the past few hours.

Never write off a squirrel

About twenty feet from our morning rendezvous point, we stumbled upon our first set of tracks. (Pro tip: don’t join a group of curious naturalists if you’re hoping to cover a lot of ground quickly…)

Sophie encouraged us to start by observing the tracks—taking note of their size, shape, and orientation—before interpreting them: What direction was the animal moving? Which species could it be? She explained how cultivating sharp observation skills and staying open-minded is crucial to decoding animal tracks in the snow.

These particular tracks revealed a bounding (i.e., leaping) pattern, with two telltale pairs of prints (the front and hind feet). The size of the prints and the trails connecting tree to tree pointed us to an eastern gray squirrel, bounding through the fresh snow in the past few hours.

Sophie Mazowita pointing out fresh tracks from an eastern gray squirrel.

We learned how slight differences could tell different stories: smaller but similar tracks would belong to a red squirrel, while a subtle shift in the orientation of the feet might signal prints of a flying squirrel.

Tracking isn’t just about footprints. Animals leave all kinds of signs of their movements if we tune into their umwelt, not ours. Sophie showed us “squirrel stripes” on the base of some trees—spots where squirrels chew on the bark and rub their cheek glands, leaving scent messages for each other. It’s like the “coffee shop bulletin board” for squirrels, Sophie said.

I’ll never dismiss a squirrel as ordinary again—learning how they navigate the world invites us to step outside our human-centric sensory bubble.

A squirrel stripe on a black locust trunk at Ethan Allen Homestead.

A springtail surprise

In addition to observing tracks and other signs of wildlife, sometimes looking closer—literally—can reveal stories in the winter woods.

Take snow fleas, for example. These tiny creatures are often overlooked unless you use magnification. Unlike the parasitic fleas you might be familiar with, these harmless arthropods—also known as springtails—hop around in the snow on warm winter days. They live in the soil and emerge into the snow, often found clustered within animal tracks.

Snow fleas with my hand for scale. Do you see the tiny black dots?

A special shoutout to my friend Braden DeForge, who captured them with his iPhone macro lens:

Not only mammals leave tracks

It may seem obvious, but we were caught off guard today: not only mammals leave tracks. When tracking animals, following a set of prints for a while can help you gather more clues about who made them.

We were following a trail of prints through the woods at Leddy Park when we hit a dead end—literally. The tracks just disappeared at both ends of the trail. How could that be?

Birds!

It’s easy to forget that our umwelt is biased toward creatures that walk on the ground—not those that fly.

One end of the trail we were following led to two distinct arched prints. At first, we were stumped. Whose feet could make tracks like that?

Then, it clicked—wings! Not all prints in the snow are feet, that’s a human-centric assumption.

We’d stumbled upon evidence of a bird, likely a crow, swooping down to the forest floor, perhaps searching for a snack beneath the fresh snow.

Once again, tracking the creatures around invites us into another sensory realm and provides a humbling reminder that we are not the only ones using these woods.

Note the curved prints where the bird landed in the snow. Then it pivoted 90-degrees and walked on the forest floor until it took off again.

The drizzle castle tree

To weave together winter tree identification with tracking, Alicia gave us homework for today’s field day. Each person was assigned to a tree and asked to look up a few facts about it, to be ready to share about the tree we came across it in the woods.

Hackberry was a new tree for me today. It’s one of those things that once you know what it is, you begin to see it everywhere. It has a very distinctive bark, described scientifically as having “wart-like protuberances.” Other, more pleasant descriptors our group came up with included the bark’s resemblance to 1) the Badlands National Park and 2) a drizzle sand castle.

One of my fellow naturalists is from South Dakota, so the Badlands thing totally worked for them. Having grown up playing in the sand on New England beaches, drizzle castles really hit home, and I will now never forget hackberry—the drizzle castle tree.

A friendly reminder that even as humans with the same five senses, we all have different, and perfectly valid experiences and perceptions of the world around us.

Hackberry, Celtis occidentalis.

Who is living in my backyard?

In the summer, my morning ritual involves checking on my garden from the window at the top of the stairs. Bleary-eyed, I take in how it changes from day to day—tomatoes ripening, beans climbing their trellises, zinnias abloom—and then I scurry downstairs and out into the backyard to get a closer look. I love paying attention to how everything changes daily.

But today, after spending the day learning about winter ecology in Burlington, I realized I hadn’t been paying as much attention to the backyard lately. Covered in snow, the garden is dormant, and I had been operating under the assumption that—other than squirrels feasting at the bird feeder—not much is going on out there.

This evening as I peeled off my snow clothes and glanced out the window, I noticed something that I had not observed before. Besides the familiar squirrel tracks, there were other prints leading toward the shed. From the size and pattern, I think they belong to a cottontail rabbit bounding over to the shed looking for a cozy shelter during the snowstorm during the early hours of this morning.

I am always grateful for how this naturalist training sharpens my attention, expanding my own umwelt, to help me better appreciate the happenings in my own backyard.

All photos by Leslie Spencer unless otherwise noted.

This post was originally published here.

By Alicia Daniel, Director of Vermont Master Naturalist. This is a reflection on the origin of VMN. It starts with her own journey to become a naturalist.

No one becomes a naturalist by accident. It doesn’t happen because your guidance counselor suggests it’s a good idea. Ask any naturalist. Blazing their own trail will be at the heart of their story.

My “career path” began in the forests, fields, and riversides of Montana, with me watching beavers while my dad and siblings fished for trout or fell into the stream. It took another 20 years to arrive at anything

resembling a trail head. It was a winding path with no map and plenty of dead ends.

And yet I woke up as a naturalist on an island in Bear Track Cove, Alaska, the summer I turned 28. Yawning from lack of sleep—in the middle of the night, the shush, shush of my eyelashes brush-ing against my sleeping bag sounded like a bear walking around outside my tent—I made my way down to the beach. I’d traveled to Alaska to track black bears. I was, at best, a novice tracker. But when I came upon a set of large pawprints with the mud gooshing up between the five toes, I knew they were fresh and I knew they were bear. I looked across the mudflat that now connected me to the mainland to discover (a) I was not on an island, and (b) the bear tracks led right to a black bear. Backlit by the rising sun, a halo of fur glowed around his head. I stood up, shook off my jacket, and waved it around, as I’d been told to do. He started walking toward me. Black bears in Glacier Bay defend their salmon streams against brown bears, which is to say they are big. Clearly there were safer places to be.

My journey to Alaska actually began a year earlier. After landing my dream job in Austin, Texas, with Bat Conservation International, I’d helped them move from Milwaukee to Austin, overseeing the installation of the phones and watching with pride as workmen bracketed bookshelves to the field station’s freshly sheetrocked walls. I loved the perks of field work, like a trip to Bracken Cave where 20 million Mexican free-tailed bats emerged at sunset like a black tornado. But it was my first day in the new office and I now had an in–person boss and the honeymoon was over. I was sitting at my desk feeling cooped up and claustrophobic, when I heard a metallic rending sound above me that made my hair stand on end. A fully loaded shelf of books torn off the wall, one end hitting a filing cabinet to my right forming a triangular cave with the floor. As I threw myself sideways into this shelter, a thousand pounds of books and shelves crashed down where I had been sitting. I rose up out of the rubble with sudden and sweeping resolve: I was not going to die at a desk slipstreaming behind some famous naturalist. I was going to be a naturalist—or at least die trying.

Every 27 to 29 years, the planet Saturn returns to the sign it was in when you were born. In astrological lore, Saturn is the great taskmaster. He breaks you down, makes you lift heavy weights, so you can get into fighting shape. In my 28th year, I left Bat Conservation International, leapt from an English degree into a Master of Science program, crawled through a flooding cave for my “interview,” moved to Vermont where I figured out how to dress in winter layers (not one big bulky sweater), learned to cross-country ski to the amusement of my peers so I could follow moose through willow thickets in Wyoming, fended of unwanted advances from men who were hired to teach me, and much more. By the time I met up with that black bear, I was in fighting shape. As he stared me down, I slipped quietly into the forest. But later my friend, Michele, and I came back to steal one of his salmon for dinner.

After my encounter with the bear, I got married and spent the next 29 years as a mild-mannered university lecturer raising two children and working part-time as a naturalist. Then, one day when I was walking in the Vermont woods with students, we came upon a black bear skull.

By this time, I had found porcupine skulls, beaver skulls, deer skulls, seal skulls, mouse skulls, raccoon skulls, coyote skulls, fox skulls, and even gull skulls, but never a bear skull. As we turned it over, a long canine tooth fell out of its jaw. I felt a premonition. I took the tooth home and strung it on a leather cord around my neck. Things were about to change. My older daughter was already studying and working in Boston, and my younger daughter was headed off to college, too. My teaching at UVM was drying up

under a new budgeting model. Saturn was returning. I needed to get back into fighting shape.

I dreamed of migrating my naturalist teaching out of UVM (keeping ties only to the Field Naturalist Program) and into Vermont townships. So I started the Vermont Master Naturalist Program. I registered this “school” as a business because I am too old to listen to a board of directors, be routinely audited, write lots of grants, or even complete the necessary nonprofit paperwork. Every step of the process was a bear, from finding insurance to negotiating deals with partners. I quickly discovered that I don’t resonate well with business culture. In my new business–owner role, people either want to sell me things or teach me how to sell things. (Wear red! Be confident! Hand the person you’re talking to your phone so they can’t walk away from you!?!) None of this felt natural or worthwhile to me.

I wanted to find people who dream of being naturalists, create a path for them, help them meet other naturalists, and put them to work on saving nature in their towns. I wanted them to understand that being a naturalist is a practice. It is how you spend your time, not how much you know. People often don’t grow up to be naturalists even when it is their heart’s desire. Now for over 500 people and counting, the Vermont Master Naturalist Program is making that dream come true.

On a recent Saturday, I went tracking with Vermont Master Naturalists at a granite quarry where bobcat, coyote, porcupine, and fisher tracks mapped out their travels from the talus to the icy edge of the quarry pool. I am, at best, a middling tracker. But I delight in spending time with people who want to be out in the woods. When I see something magical, I want to turn to a kindred spirit and whisper, “Look”! I have a couple of decades before Saturn returns next time. In the meantime, I will be out in the woods.

This post was originally published here, and here.

Tag: photography

Winter tracks and trees