Dirt Time at Oxbow - 10/30/07

Dirt Time
Oxbow Park
10/28/07
9am-Noon

It was a gorgeous fall day at Oxbow on Sunday. The light and the leaves had the golden hue of autumn. It was the kind of day where it’s just cool enough that you keep moving to the sunny spots (at least I did), and you are pleasantly reminded of how good it feels just to bask.

Some folks saw a salmon carcass by the river and Lete saw what might have been a female salmon building a redd. I saw some scat at Mecca that looked fox-like, but the quantity might tip the scale toward coyote. Two deer trails close to the channel suggested a buck strutting his stuff alongside a doe (one set of tracks deeper, with a lot of displaced sand in front of the track) – at least this much according to Trevor – apparently there were other, more embellished versions of the story). I enjoyed puzzling over the opossum tracks at Mecca – that’s the first time I’ve seen opossum at Oxbow. They were smallish in size compared to the colossal opossum (say that 5 times fast) that comes through my Portland yard once in a while. Pat C. said the coolest thing about ‘possum tracks is that they look like flowers (the toes appear to go in all directions!).

Incidentally, this was Dusty’s (my 4 mo. old) first trip to Oxbow! He cried half the way there and most of the way home, but he peacefully snoozed most of the time we were on the floodplain, with the help of much shushing and jiggling from his dad.

BIRDS (seen, heard or tracks seen)
Ruby-crowned Kinglet
Canada Goose
Downy Woodpecker
Raven
Black-capped chickadee
Winter Wren
Great Blue Heron
Red Tailed Hawk

MAMMALS (track or scat seen)
Deer
Elk
Beaver
Raccoon
Coyote
Opossum
Bobcat
Rabbit

News from the 'Bow

A bear visited Camp Collins last night, ( Tuesday October 16th ), scavenging garbage from open dumpsters. The natural path away from the dumpsters leads toward the Floodplain, so maybe we'll get lucky at the upcoming October dirt time...

j

Longtime tracking club member and tracking instructor Terry Kem will present a tracking workshop at Oxbow Park on October 27th. More details:

http://calendar.metro-region.org/dsp_details.cfm?event_id=25502

Hope to see folks there !

j

First Blog Post

Hi and welcome!