Follow the footprints: trackers know where the otters roam
Paula Coughlin’s tracking group in Woodstock.
April 11, 2020 — This article originally appeared in the Spring 2020 edition of Connecticut Audubon’s Conservation News
Paula Coughlin’s leadership of the Center at Pomfret’s wildlife tracking program is all about making connections and drawing inferences.
That mark on a snowy rock? A bobcat sat there to survey its landscape.
The small downslope half-pipe through the snow? Otters used it to slide into a river.
That group of creatures together in the woods? Volunteers trained by Paula to distinguish signs of fisher from mink, otter from bobcat, bear from moose.
“They feel really connected to the out of doors, and I feel that they’re the eyes and ears of the community,” Paula said. “They see things others might not see, and they pass that information along. These people have become my friends because we all share this passion.”
Paula, a retired science teacher who lives in Woodstock Valley, started the Citizen Science Wildlife and Tracking Program in 2003. She’s trained 147 volunteers who have logged 9,216 hours in the field. About a dozen volunteers have stuck with it for a decade or more.
They monitor in four locations — Woodstock, Willington, Canterbury, and Bethany — spending at least a day in the woods each season (snow creates the best tracking conditions). They scour transects that are 60-feet wide and two or three miles long through forests, fields, shrubs, rivers, streams, swamps — places where they’re likely to see signs of the moose, bear, bobcat, otter, fisher, and mink they focus on.
“We rarely actually see the wildlife,” Paula says. “They see us, we don’t see them.”
The Woodstock trackers followed bobcat paw prints to a rock, where they found this impression of its body in the snow.
“It’s not rocket science,” says Francis Baranski, a Pomfret Center resident, who has been a volunteer tracker and trainer almost since the start, “but you’re out there and you see it and you pay attention — that’s when you learn.”
They’ve found moose signs on three tracts (not Bethany). They found bear claw marks on an autumn olive tree. They discovered bobcat tracks when they stopped for lunch in the snowy woods, and then followed them to a rock where the bobcat had probably stopped to look for its lunch. One otter slide stretched for 50 feet.
“We get excited about just about anything,” Paula says, “but the most fun is when we find otter slides. We felt like we just missed the party.”
Connecticut Audubon keeps the data and sends some of it to the University of Connecticut, which owns the land in Willington that the trackers cover, and to the Bethany Land Trust, which owns the Bethany land. The data have helped bolster support for land preservation and habitat protection.
The project is ongoing. If you’re interested in volunteering, email Paula: paulacoughlin@charter.net.
