Water and Animals

It's been almost three weeks since I have been at my spot due to Spring Break, and I was excited to see the changes that had occurred. Since Sunday was officially the first day of Spring, I was anxious to see whether my site reflected the technical change of season or not. I wasn't disappointed, the snow had all but disappeared, making my walk along the beach a whole lot easier. The ice that had covered the lake for the past few months had all but melted; there was just a thin skim left on the surface. Interestingly the piles of ice the waves had formed had changed as well. Instead of just melting away, the ice had formed thin sheets, almost like piles of windowpanes.

All this melting snow and ice had to go somewhere, and that somewhere was the lake. There were large rivets all along the beach where water had flowed into the lake recently. I'm curious as to whether the Parks and Recreation service adds more sand, or smooths out the beach in another way, since I don't remember there being rivets in the summer when everyone is there. 

Further along the beach, closer to Lone Rock Point was an actual stream I had never noticed before since it was buried in the snow. It  was very peaceful to sit there for a while and listen to the rush of the water in the stream, along with the creak of the ice as it entered into the lake.

All this excess water entering the lake has caused the lake to expand. At first I thought it was just a change in perspective since the snow was gone and it was easier to see the boundaries of the lake, but as I walked along, I reached a section where the lake definitely reached farther inshore than usual. Usually there is a strip of beach that runs the whole way to the tree line and the path that goes up into Lone Rock Point, but that path was all but gone on Sunday, making me very glad I had worn my rubber rain boots. You can see in the picture below that the water covers the base of the tree, definitely not what it's supposed to do. 

While the changes in the water were perhaps the most interesting aspects of my site this week, I also looked for signs of animals like we were supposed to do. There were several tracks both in the sand and in the snow up in the woods for me to use my intense tracking skills, learned in half and hour in class, to identify. 

This set of tracks in the sand is clearly from some sort of bird. It appears to me, that there is some webbing between the toes in the tracks leading me to believe that they are from some sort of goose or duck, both of which I have seen at my site before.  

I'm leaning towards this next set of track being from a rabbit, since the front paw prints are behind the hind paw prints, very typical of a rabbit. I also saw prints I believed to be from a striped skunk, but since the batteries of my camera had given out (yes, more camera trouble) I don't have a visual for it. I do however have several more photos of animals tracks from previous excursions to my site. One excursion, I was actually the first person out in the woods after a big snow storm, so all the animal tracks were still clear to see and hadn't been obscured by bootprints.

In this picture you can clearly see the line where the tail was dragging, making these mouse tracks. 

It's harder to tell what kind of animal made these tracks since they just appear as holes in the snow, but because they come from one tree and head to another, I'm going to say they were from a squirrel. 

It was nice to be able to see the ground at my site, but even as I am writing this, it is snowing quite heavily, so it may be a while before I glimpse the ground again. Even though it's technically Spring, it appears that actual Springtime it still a ways off yet.