Tracks in the Snow

With yesterday's snow still lying on the upper slopes of Beinn Bhraggie we....

....walked up through the forestry, quickly coming onto trackways where the snow lay thick and crisp enough for tracks to be clearly visible, mostly those of humans, a trail bike and dogs, but also of more interesting things.

Some are fairly easy to identify, like these ones of a rabbit, but the tiny trail running left to right might be a bird but seems more likely to have been a small mammal.

With a size 10 boot for scale, this is a deer but complicated by the fact that two impressions from the same animal are superimposed - forefoot and hind foot. It might be a red deer while....

....this, according to my research, could be either a roe or fallow deer. I would guess the former because we have seen roe deer in the forestry, and their tracks are larger than the fallow.

We followed two of these trails, possibly of small dogs with rather short legs moving in the opposite direction to the single boot mark at bottom right.

Other tracks are more difficult to identify but these may be the most exciting. Here there are those of a man with his dog walking along the trackway, with something crossing later from bottom right to top left, seemingly hopping with its feet together. This is very likely to have been a pine marten.