# Track Identification



## Lonetree (Dec 4, 2010)

This pattern repeats over and over again. They are going uphill. Size 10.5 shoe for reference. ????

Sorry, not very good picture, it was taken with my phone.


----------



## Kevin D (Sep 15, 2007)

Inconclusive for me to say for certain, but my first impression is that with the repeating pattern it possibly could have been made by one of the larger cousins of the weasel family. Right now I'm remembering that wolverine captured on trail cam last year in the Uintahs, and I'm remembering a set of mystery tracks from the 1970's I encountered while trapping bobcat up Main Canyon near the head waters of Blacksmith Fork river and I'm asking myself is it possible??

I dunno. I'm not going out on a limb and saying for sure, but I would have liked to walk out the track for a while and seen it for myself.....


----------



## Fowlmouth (Oct 4, 2008)

Wolverine was my thought as well.


----------



## Lonetree (Dec 4, 2010)

Kevin D said:


> Inconclusive for me to say for certain, but my first impression is that with the repeating pattern it possibly could have been made by one of the larger cousins of the weasel family. Right now I'm remembering that wolverine captured on trail cam last year in the Uintahs, and I'm remembering a set of mystery tracks from the 1970's I encountered while trapping bobcat up Main Canyon near the head waters of Blacksmith Fork river and I'm asking myself is it possible??
> 
> I dunno. I'm not going out on a limb and saying for sure, but I would have liked to walk out the track for a while and seen it for myself.....


Well, so far everyone that has seen it, without being prompted has said the same thing....Wolverine.

I came across a set of tracks that had a more defined 3 by 3 pattern in spring of '95 or '96, in The Wasatch range above Ogden. At the time I did not know what they were. Nothing that size, made sense with the way it was walking. After looking it up later, I knew it had to be a wolverine, and the holes dug in the snow made even more sense. LMAO when I read Osbourne Russell's trapper journal a few years later. His encounter with a wolverine in the 1840s, was within sight of mine 150 years later.

We walked these tracks for about 100 yards, with my brother obliterating half the tracks. They led up the steep road we were walking. Most of the snow in the area was on the road. The valley we got to at the top of the road, was devoid of snow, but the North slope of the 9500' peak, on the other side of that small valley, that those tracks were pointed at, still had lots of snow. With melt out being what it is, I would say those tracks could not have been a full 48 hours old. There were older lion tracks in the bottom of the canyon.

I don't have much doubt as to what it was, but I saw a lot more than whats in the picture. Those center tracks have the toes turned in, and you could make out 5 toes a couple of them. I am just kicking myself for not packing the good camera.

Thanks!, I was hoping a houndsman would chime in. I can take you to the spot if you are interested.


----------



## Blanding_Boy (Nov 21, 2007)

porcupine...


----------



## Lonetree (Dec 4, 2010)

Blanding_Boy said:


> porcupine...


No drag marks, and the front and rear tracks are similar in size, and far more rounded than porcupine. Porcupine walk bipedal on their rear feet that resemble bear and racoon tracks, which are longer and more narrow than the front tracks. The pattern is all wrong as well, porcupine "shuffle" left-right bipedal, very different.


----------



## Lonetree (Dec 4, 2010)

Here is how the numbers play out:

Tracks in the picture.
Width: 8cm
Stride: 58cm
Straddle: 19cm


----------



## LanceS4803 (Mar 5, 2014)

You guys are good! A lot of experience on this page.


----------



## wyogoob (Sep 7, 2007)

Good job guys.

I took the liberty to downsize and remove the blue tint from the picture.

The UWN lifted it's photo size restrictions awhile back but some photos are just too big for the members to view comfortably. Also the forum has limits on the amount of data it can hold and pictures eat up a lot of it. 

Most computer screens are 96 pixels per inch these days; so a picture size of 8 to 9 inches wide at 96, or 72, pixels per inch is recommended.

Thanks for your cooperation.

.


----------



## Lonetree (Dec 4, 2010)

Goob, thanks for the resize, and enhancement.

I had another response from a guy that immediately said mustelid, but proposed the option of the tracks belonging to a large fisher. When I described the habitat, mixed firs and aspen in association with a riparian area, he said that sounded more like a fisher to him. He did not rule out wolverine, as they have a very wide range of track sizes. 

The tracks do fall right in a very narrow window of overlap. Based on what our tracks from earlier in the day were doing, filling with water, and filling in. Its possible that the individual tracks would have registered larger if seen earlier. In which case wolverine makes more sense. Or, if melt out has made the individual tracks look larger, then fisher looks more likely.

Some of the other tracks you can see in the picture are moose, which did not occur in this mountain range just a few years ago, and bighorns have shown up as well, travelling on their own from Idaho. So other things showing up is entirely possible. 

Whether it is a wolverine or a fisher, these were found in Box Elder county Utah, well outside of other known sightings. And I just cant make anything with that size track, work with that pattern. Nothing else lopes or gallops with a pattern like that. The pattern and stride were variable with terrain, which is another hallmark of mustelids.


----------



## stillhunterman (Feb 15, 2009)

Would be cool if it was a Wolverine. I was going to suggest Fisher or Marten, but hard to determine from the pic. Cool nonetheless...


----------



## Lonetree (Dec 4, 2010)

Way too small for marten.(Edit: Marten are too small to have left the tracks) I have seen several marten in the Uintas, and a HUGE one in Montana, that we got this picture of. There is nothing for size reference, so its hard to tell how big he is from this head shot, but I have pelt from a very large one from Alaska in my "office", that is about the same size. A marten like that has a track that would register about 1.25-1.5 inches, which is a big track for the size of the animal.


----------



## Lonetree (Dec 4, 2010)

Picture of large Alaskan marten pelt with 12" ruler for reference.


----------



## wyogoob (Sep 7, 2007)

Lonetree said:


> Picture of large Alaskan marten pelt with 12" ruler for reference.


There are fair numbers of martens in the mountains of western Wyoming and in Wyoming's Wind River Range. Some are the size of house cats.

I've only seen a few martens in the Uintas and they seem to be relatively smaller.

.


----------



## Lonetree (Dec 4, 2010)

Sorry, I edited my post about marten size, the first sentence makes no sense. I meant that marten were too small to have left the tracks. That's what I get for posting while I should be paying attention to my work.


----------



## wyogoob (Sep 7, 2007)

Lonetree said:


> Sorry, I edited my post about marten size, the first sentence makes no sense. I meant that marten were too small to have left the tracks. That's what I get for posting while I should be paying attention to my work.


Yeah, I got it.

I turned a marten sighting in to the Wasatch National Forest Service office a while back and they told me "you probably seen a weasel"

Getting back to the wolverine thing: I did a lot of wilderness hiking BGPS (before the Global Positioning System) so I was continually off-trail, lost actually. The wilderness in these parts, though foreboding and intimidating, is full of friendly sheepherders guarding their flocks. These hands know exactly where they're at and if if you speak Castillian Spanish they can help you find your truck, the nearest road, or at a minimum, a stream that ends up in Provo. And they are more than willing to share anecdotal observations about wolverines.

Anyway, if you got a wilderness, you got domestic sheep and if you have domestic sheep you'll have dead sheep carcasses all over the place. Wolverines target the sheep carcasses and often times I would find tracts around the carcasses that looked like wolverine tracts. Currently I use a GPS and I can monitor, even record, where I am lost and any wolverine tracts I encounter while I'm lost. So I built a data base of wolverine tract coordinates.

My GPS thingie will only take five letters to name a log file. So I named my wolverine tract sighting files "wolve". Soon after that, dozens, perhaps thousands, of wolves moved in, decimated the Utah deer herd, and then went after sheep carcasses. At that point I started recording wolf tracts and without thinking named them "wolve" also. So I got a mess; can't tell my wolf tracts from my wolverine tracts...uh... a common malady found on many mountain west outdoor forums.

Seriously, I've always thought there were a few wolverines out there. They hang in very remote areas, are seldom out during the day, but cover a lot of country and one wolverine will make a lot of tracts. I'm surprised they don't end up in traps or snares from time to time.

FYI: A wolverine was caught on a trail cam south of Evanston last year; probably the same one that was filmed a number of days later on the south slope of the Uintas. A few years back another wolverine was killed in Wyoming on Hwy 30 around Fossil Butte National Monument, not all that far from the Utah border.

.


----------



## Lonetree (Dec 4, 2010)

There are sheep in this area, but surprisingly few dead sheep compared with other places I frequent. :grin: We always brought gifts for the sheep herder, it can save you a lot of scouting time. I always find dead cows there, the place is littered with them, more than normal. We did find a lot of chewed up deer bone last fall, on top of the mountain.

If this was in the Wasatch, or the Uintas, I would not be as surprised. I understand the travel and migration corridors between the Northern and Southern Rockies through those parts of world much better. Whether its wolves from Idaho/Wyoming or Lynx from Colorado, that travel makes sense. These tracks are much closer to Nevada, than Wyoming, in fact you can see Idaho and Nevada quite clearly. So I am assuming if it came from anywhere, it was out of the Sawtooth population in Idaho. This place is remote, does not get a lot of traffic, and the tracks were found at the edge of the largest, road less portion of the range. There have been wolverine sightings South of here in Great basin National park. And a collared lion from near these tracks, was documented to have made the journey to GBNP.

Yeah, I have not bothered to report to any official agencies. My reporting of wolves, bears, and other things over the years have been met with nothing but skepticism. I have forwarded the info to some nonprofits though. Depending on how much I get done in the next few days, and what my kidneys are doing(stones), I'll be back out in a few days. They have kits this time of year, so I'm crossing my fingers.......


----------



## The Naturalist (Oct 13, 2007)

wyogoob said:


> There are fair numbers of martens in the mountains of western Wyoming and in Wyoming's Wind River Range. Some are the size of house cats.
> 
> I've only seen a few martens in the Uintas and they seem to be relatively smaller.
> 
> .


The martens I've seen in the Uintas were at least the size of house cats, but I can't compare them with the Wind Rivers.


----------



## wyogoob (Sep 7, 2007)

The Naturalist said:


> The martens I've seen in the Uintas were at least the size of house cats, but I can't compare them with the Wind Rivers.


Yeah. I hang at the same place up in the Wyoming Range (Greys River drainage) every fall. There's a resident family of martens there and they come around camp nearly every year. They only come out at night; normal behavior.

I usually sleep on the ground, no tent. And the martens will scurry up and down and all around the trees, sometimes above my head, sometimes silhouetted against a moonlit sky, so they can look a lot bigger than what they actually are. 

35 years ago I wanted to trap them and nail them to a piece of wood in the office. Now they're my buds and I enjoy their company. ;-)

.


----------



## massmanute (Apr 23, 2012)

*Chupacabra! Quite rare in these parts.
*


----------

