Darkness’s Secrets – Day 814

Pristine @ 10:56 p.m. – Photo: L. Weikel

Darkness’s Secrets

You just never know what’s going to be lurking around outside when the lights are out. It’s no secret I’ve had my share of vicarious encounters (mostly courtesy of Spartacus barreling out the door in milder weather only to bowl over an opossum snacking on sunflower seeds or a skunk snagging a couple peanuts from under the peanut coil). But last night I wouldn’t even have known we had a visitor at all had the snow not been quite so revelatory of darkness’s secrets.

My photo at the top of this post was taken last night at 10:56 p.m. I was preparing to write my post and Spartacus needed to make a quick stop outside before heading upstairs to cuddle with Karl. Spart wastes no time dilly-dallying outside when we’re in the midst of a snowstorm.

The stillness was lovely – the only sound being an eerie one note tone resonating ever so softly from our wind chimes. The pile of snow perched atop our metal fire pit cover was one indication of the 18” or so of snow we got. (I was astonished when it continued snowing throughout this morning.)

I took the photo at 10:56 p.m. because of the utter absence of footprints anywhere. It was too deep for Spartacus to bound into (especially this late at night) for the purpose of relieving himself. Even all the bird prints underneath the feeders had been covered by additional snow falling long after the birds had nested up for the night.

So…What Was THAT?

So when I turned the lights on one more time before heading up to bed myself last night (at 2:33 a.m.), I was a little surprised to see the obvious footprints before me. But then, when I looked a bit closer, I was even more surprised and not a little bit puzzled.

I tried zooming in on the photo I took, but that doesn’t seem to translate well into a blog post. (I’m including it at the end anyway.) So the best I can do is include the photo as it appears in my iPhone, and if you’re interested, you can zoom in on it yourself.

So Many Questions

I find a few things intriguing about these footprints:

• They don’t come all the way up to the feeders. So…no snacking on birdseed (or peanuts, although the peanut coil is not in this frame);
• Although they don’t come all the way up to the feeders, there’s also no indication that they were either spooked and fled quickly OR that they turned around. So…how did they make their way back into the woods from which they came?
• There is a huge space between ‘strides’ of this animal. Was it huge? Was it hopping? I might think a jack rabbit (but they don’t live around here), so…might it have been a fox? I’ve seen videos of them sort of hopping through snow. But it still flummoxes me how they got themselves turned around so they could return to the woods, though.
• There seemed to be at least two, maybe three or even four different animals out there at the same time. There was the ‘big strider’ over toward the right, just beyond the cone of the fire pit snow, but the prints on the left look decidedly smaller and the stride is so much more abbreviated it makes me doubt they were the same species.

And all of this happened under the cloak of darkness in the span of 3.5 hours. While I was sitting inside writing my post and reading my book, living and breathing beings were hanging out in my yard, deciding whether or not to indulge in some birdseed, retreating back into the forest without obviously turning around, making choices based on who knows what information or intuition?

Just another couple of darkness’s secrets, I guess.

(T-297)