How to Track Beavers

Video Transcript

Hi we’re Nick and Valerie Wisniewski on behalf of Expert Village.com. We are going to talk a little bit about beaver tracks and for more information you can check our website at www.walnuthilltracking.com. Let’s look at a beaver track if we can. The front foot of a beaver which is the largest member of the rodent order here in North America has 5 toes. That is very unique among rodents. All of our other rodents only have a vestigial thumb. The beaver has 5 well developed toes on its front foot for holding and grasping objects. The hind foot has 5 toes like all rodents. Beaver tracks are obviously dimorphic in their size. The hind foot is enormous compared to the front foot. Some other features to look for are on the hind foot usually only 2 or perhaps 3 of the blunt claws will show. The other toes are often times obscured by a webbing. The webbing doesn’t always show up in the track but what it does it obscures toes and features of the track. Let’s look at some patterns on the ground. When the beaver walks, it does not cover a lot of ground very quickly. It is an aquatic mammal. Most of the time it is swimming but of course it has to come on land to feed. When it walks and leaves a trail, it takes short steps. What we’ve got here is a variety of different kinds of steps. In this first case here, we’ve got what’s called the under step where the hind foot did not travel as far as the front foot did. Next we have a direct register where the hind foot landed directly on top of the front foot and then we have an over step where the hind foot traveled a little bit further than the front foot followed by one where the hind and front landed side by side. The beaver trail that you encounter in the wild will be like that. It will be quite variable, not a very consistent gait. Two features that you do look for though are very short steps. Some are around 6 to 10 ¾ perhaps between foot falls and also a very wide trail in about the same distance from 6 to 10 inches or so. So in a beaver trail, the width is about the same as the length meaning that you have a very boxy looking pattern on the ground.

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