How to Track Gray Squirrels

Video Transcript

"Hi we’re Nick and Valerie Wisniewski on behalf of Expert Village.com. We would like to talk about gray squirrel tracks and if you want more information, you can visit our website www.walnuthilltracking.com. The gray squirrel is a fairly ubiquitous prey animal in the Northeast and it’s a member of the squirrel family and it’s the rodent order. Like most other rodents on their front feet, there are only 4 toes and on the hind feet there are 5 toes. The pattern that you see on the ground is the result of what scientists and people that study locomotion tells us is a full bound. The cotton tail rabbit and snow shoe hare for example do what is called a half bound. I’m going to show you more about this in a moment. On the ground what we’ve done is we’ve laid down some examples of gray squirrel track patterns and when the gray squirrel is bounding, what happens is what you have left on the ground the feet in the front are actually the hind feet. So the front feet will briefly touch the ground and then the hind feet will touch the ground and the hind feet will actually propel the animal through the air. The set of tracks in the middle here shows what is more like a rabbit bound wherein the 2 front feet, one of the feet travels a little bit further than the other. Sometimes squirrels will do this whereas sometimes rabbits will do what is more like a classic squirrel bound. Keep in mind that the stride or the distance that the gray squirrel travels is extremely variable. The only other real animal you could mistake it for in a mixed habitat might be the red squirrel and the red squirrel moves in a very similar way but with the red squirrel, the trail width is much narrower. Whereas the gray squirrel that we have here, the trail width is going to be somewhere between 4 and 6 inches across from here to here. The red squirrel is going to be more like 3 to 4. "