So, we’re having us a nice little bit of winter over here, and some snowfall over the past two days. This morning, when I went to get the mail, I noticed some tracks in the snow – rather huge prints, about one meter apart, in a nearly perfect straight line. So, I took some pictures: here’s a single print with cm-scale for comparison (the depression in the snow starts roughly where the 0 of the scale is, though it’s not clearly visible in the pic; seems like that’s where the paw pushed away the snow), and here are two consecutive ones, again with a scale.
It doesn’t look like either cat or dog, which are just about the only animals I’d expect to see here. Deer, maybe? There are some in the surrounding woods, but for them to come out that far seems unusual…
Interesting. Location is essential in a post like yours, btw, but, while it’s hard to tell, those look similar to the tracks in MY yard, too. I see deer tracks, and rabbit tracks, but I am not sure what those are.
They definitely look like hooves. So I’d say either Satan or a red deer. Do they have any other types of deer in your area? Is it possible they’re livestock, like cow tracks?
Well, there hasn’t been any melting yet, but it’s gotta be deer, anyway (livestock could hardly sneak the passage the tracks take undetected) – fascinating, I didn’t think they’d come this far between the houses. Thanks for the replies!
I have a row of arborvitae attached to our house…the deer come right up and eat it as far as their neck with reach. I’ve got some pictures somewhere taken out our living room window. Deer have no problem coming in close especially if you are in an area where there is little hunting.
Here’s again a picture of a couple of prints (six – the topmost one is a little displaced to the left, the tracks take a turn there; you can also see the mark where I put the scale), and here’s another print I found backtracking on their path; is it possible that deer put their hind hooves into the prints left by their front hooves? Because this looks like a composite print, as if the deer had stepped into the same place more than once, or something.
They must be deer here, too, then. I’m also surprised - we live in a quiet little neighborhood, but there’s lots of houses around. Behind us is a wooded area, but it’s not thick woods at all. Weird.
We have a very clear deer track coming down out of the hills behind our house and heading straight for our apple trees. I think it’s very cool. Though I’ll change my mind next year when we plant a garden and spray the apples.
Deer do just great in suburban settings to the point of being pests sometimes. Our neighborhood is semi-rural and it is infested with them but there is a large McMansion subdivision down the street and they graze right out in the open in people’s front yards. They are often standing in my driveway when I get home. They are a species that thrives around human habitation.
My dad has 10 acres on the west facing foothills of the santa cruz mountains in CA. The land around him is fairly well cleared with only little pockets of a few acres of woods here and there. Even so, deer are a regular sight and you don’t have outdoor dogs due to coyotes and mountain lions.
That said 10cm strikes me as pretty big tracks for the deer I am used to seeing that leave tracks maybe half that size.
Yes, deer (at least Blacktails and Muleys, what we have out West) step their hind feet more or less into the tracks of their front feet. From what I can see on your picture, it looks like deer to me. The edges don’t seem to be sharply defined, so the tracks very well could appear larger due to crumbling.
Elk tracks are rounder, more like a cow’s. Deer tracks are straighter, like those you’ve got there.
White-tailed deer on the east coast of the US have multiplied to the point that they’re living in more and more marginal habitats. My parents have lived in the same inner-ring NJ suburb, without any big patches of woods nearby, for thirty years, and deer have just moved into the neighborhood this past year.
