Birds and animals leave their tracks all over the marsh. Hunters follow tracks to find game, but even if you aren't hunting for anything it's a good idea to keep your eyes open for tracks of dangerous creatures.

(Sometimes that includes the aforementioned hunters.
The dangerous ones can
be detected by the presence
of large quantities of
empty beer containers.)

Raccoons have very distinctive paw-prints. They like to dig up turtle nests and eat the eggs, and they also eat fish and frogs. They are very fastidious creatures, and like to wash their food and their hands and faces at the waters edge.

The firm, wet sand at the edge of the water is the best place to find clear prints. Other locations are too overgrown with vegetation or have soft, loose sand that doesn't hold a good impression.

There are other forms of tracks than footprints in the sand. Hunters often follow an animals spoor to locate it or it's home. Spoor is a nice name for poop, in case you didn't know. You can tell a lot about an animal from it's spoor, but I have no great desire to photograph poop, so you will have to learn about that somewhere else.

<<< These tracks at the edge of the water indicate that a large wading bird has been here fishing for minnows, mussels, crawdads and frogs.   I don't know what made these interesting trails - some kind of water bugs, with birds after them. >>>

One day while pushing my boat through shallow water we saw these tracks of a large alligator.

Roll your cursor over the image to see the claw
and tail marks pointed out.

The long trail of his tail being dragged through the sand went on for quite a long ways. We pushed with a little more enthusiasm after seeing this, and were very happy to be able to get back into the boat and paddle!

From the size and spacing of the claw marks we guessed this alligator to be at least 6-7 foot long.

Somehow, when we are in the boat we feel safe. When we are outside the boat it looks very small and fragile!

These are the tracks of the elusive MarshBunny. They consist of the rinds of lemon wedges cast away after drinking Lemon Drops. These tracks are likely to be found almost anywhere in the marsh, but should not be a cause for concern as MarshBunnies are slow moving, harmless creatures who are usually heard long before they are seen.

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