As I was enjoying another of my nearly everyday walks in the woods, I encountered a disturbance in the earth crossing the trail that caught my eye.
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I was surprised to see the straight line of disturbed earth crossing the trail. Even though I don't usually walk the same trail twice in consecutive days, I had just been across this spot 24 hours ago... and it wasn't there.
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My first thought was that it could be a bike trail. There are some mountain bikers that use this trail occasionally. I thought maybe they had decided to take an overland route. 😉 As I looked around the area a little more though there were no other tracks to be seen other than this one 10 foot straight line. Besides the track started right in front of an old dead tree root ball and ended at a pile of sage brush.
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Looking closer at the track I once again started to think bike with knobby tires but knew this couldn't be so. After looking closer at the pictures I decided these were probably little animal foot prints.
In the end I figured this was probably the work of a Golden mantled ground squirrel, similar to the one above in this older picture I took with my Nikon D3300. My guess is the little guy probably lived in the old tree root ball and had been on a quite productive foraging mission over to the sage brush. 😀
I'm not sure how many trips would be required to make the type of trail I saw but it seems like it would have to be a lot to leave that mark in just 24 hours. Perhaps it was a family affair and there were several critters making the trek out and back. Or, perhaps there is an entirely different explanation of how this disturbance occurred. What's your idea? Sasquatch? Aliens? 🤔
Please feel free to make comments or ask me any questions about this post.
Photos taken by me, @oldmans, with a Samsung F20 FE phone.
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Thanks for looking and enjoy your day!