70 thoughts on “End of the line”

    1. Not a hare, the two parallel lines are a pair of small feet, probably hind ones being dragged at each hop.

  3. Jesus was carrying someone through the snow when an angel came down and took them to Heaven?

    1. Yeah I thought similar. Someone had a heart attack right there & turned into an angel. I laugh but there are members of my family that would not only believe that, but post about it on FB.

          1. True, but it’s often an unrewarding task to tell people that they don’t know enough to have an opinion on a subject.

  4. A flying crinoid crash-landed while it was wending its way home after a drunken party.

    (Okay, okay. I’m going.)

    1. Being in west Ireland, that snow isn’t local. And the party was in the post office/ general store/ library/ police (sorry, Guarda) station.

  5. Someone on the original post suggested it’s actually just a single, two-legged creature that took off in flight. Possibly a turkey. The bigger hole at the end would be from the push for take-off and then one last foot drag.
    Seems more plausible to me.

    1. It is not a bad idea, but the positions of the wings look like bird ‘mantled’ over the spot before taking off. A bird of prey makes a kind of hood over its kill to hide it from eyes lurking above.

      1. Bloodlessness is a fair point. Stronger support is from the symmetrical repeat of similar motifs near the last couple of footprints.
        I may have to revise my initial opinion.

    3. Definitely plausible.

      But I’m of two minds. I can make a case for it being an attack from behind and then a quick takeoff, too.

      The attack being seemingly quick and bloodless wouldn’t surprise me either. How often have we all seen footage of a predatory bird grabbing a small prey animal in its talons and flying off quickly? Such a thing wouldn’t necessarily cause any “blood at the scene”, so to speak.

  9. The snow buried a giant scorpion!

    Ok, more seriously…as a SWAG, I’m going to say that since there’s an unusually deep depression right where the wing pattern appears, this is a case of predation (bird landing on a critter) rather than a case of a bird hopping along for a while and then taking flight.

    1. It looks to me like a double depression, hence more consistent with a take-off leap than impact on a prey animal. Birds have to kick off pretty hard for launch, though it’s the wing action that we tend to notice more.

  12. Stunning. Whatever the predator or prey, it is the direct and very dramatic impression of an event encapsulating life and death, silently rendered but rendered in that linear way in the snow and the image becomes imbued with a kind of linguistic pictogram + Cuneiform quality (at least to me), which enhances and rarifies the narrative captured directly in the act of capture itself. Yet it is also an exquisite abstract image in and of itself. And all silent but perhaps for a rush of wings and the final squeak of the prey. And, by now, it will surely have melt away into nothing. Yet, thanks to the observant photographer, we have the haunting image to reflect on.

    1. “‘melted’ away.” Perhaps the above is just turgid, gassy bs but I was trying to express something that I probably can’t express very well, at least off the top of my head. But I find it such an arresting image.

    2. it is the direct and very dramatic impression of an event encapsulating life and death,

      … and this is why many geologists do love ichnofossils (“trace fossils”) once they get their heads around the situation.

      1. A very cool and useful word. Thanks. Alas, my paleontological days are now only the faintest of ichnofossils in my shriveling hippocampus. I hadn’t known there was a term for such things. Decades ago, a paleoichthyologist pal who worked at the LA Co. Natural History Museum, where I volunteered eons ago, gave me a small flat piece of stone bearing the imprint of what he said were traces of paleozoic raindrops. What a marvelous gift. But even he didn’t use the term and I don’t recall hearing it; but it could have slipped by, and it was so long ago that I’ve forgotten.

        1. Dad’s collection has Triassic raindrop prints from … there wasn’t a label on the specimen. I literally grew up knowing of ichnofossils. But I was well into my 20s before I found my own and started to really think about them.

  14. NEI. [Not Enough Info.]

    So did the photographer identify the track as something else than a bird? Because the tracks looks clean for a bird of prey attack.

  15. Used to see these fairly often back in my cross country skiing days after a fresh snow fall. I’m going with owl (coming in from behind) taking a stoat. They don’t look like rabbit tracks to me.

    1. I was thinking the same about the tracks but this is deep snow and they may look different due to that.

  16. Great Grey Owl and Snowshoe Hare or fox seems most likely to me. The tracks don’t look right for a hare.

  17. The tracks look like bird tracks to me, not mammal. It looks like a crow walked and then took off.

    1. Same here. Squirrel and rabbit tracks have their hind feet side-by-side. These tracks look like left-right stepping. There might be a line from a tail being dragged, too.

  18. I you do a Google image search for Bird of prey, tracks in snow you get lots of images that are relevant. Many are very similar to the above. I am personally convinced it is an avian predator-prey encounter.

  19. I have watched as a great horned owl take out an adult otter, so that’s my best guess. We were in the Ottawa valley area at resort and the whole dinning room ( it was at lunch time) were just mesmerized.

  20. My best guess: a ruffed grouse walking along then took off. I’ve seen places where they have buried themselves in snow and just take off. I was close to one when it did that; just erupted out of a pristine snow bank nearly gave me a heart attack. The tracks are not hare, rabbit or squirrel or otter or fox.

    1. I agree with Ruffed Grouse (Bonasa umbellus).
      Its footsteps are often closely spaced as it walks. That’s what we see in the photo.

      2. A ruffed grouse or turkey has a fanned tail. Look at the drag marks between the tracks and you can see the double track left by the twin display feathers on a male ring necked pheasant.

      3. That photo is definitely a grouse, but it is a landing pattern. You can see where the fanned tail hit the snow but no wing marks. It’s nowhere near the original post though.

  21. I’m reevaluating my initial guess. After looking more closely at the tracks they do seem to be two legged rather than four. I’m now thinking it may have been a crow or raven going airborn after a walk in the woods as Curt suggested above. The two large divots just behind the wing marks could be from the bird squatting before springing into flight.

  23. Not a turkey, not a bunny. Hard to judge the snow depth, but maybe a short-legged quadruped, a perfect walker like a coyote or a fox taken by a big owl or an eagle.

  27. When I lived on a small farm in rural Mo. I always enjoyed late-winter walks in our woods when the snow was melting off; I always stumbled across evidence of little life-and-death dramas that had occurred during the winter: the picked-over carcass of a deer that didn’t quite make it, here; a pile of feathers, there, forlorn rabbit tails, etc.

    Most people have seen the iconic bit of Xtian prose entitled, “Footprints In the Sand”: a man gets an opportunity to ask Jesus why, at some times in his life, he saw two sets of footprints behind him (indicating that Jesus was walking with him), but sometimes there was only one set- had Jesus abandoned him at those times? Jesus’s classic answer is, “No, my son- those were the times when I was CARRYING you.”

    There’s a slightly more rational version of this where Jesus replies, “Those were the times when I was busy helping someone who needed it more than YOU did, you silly, self-centered SOB!”

    I read a true story a few years ago: a coke dealer who had been “getting high on his own supply” walked into his house. Looking behind him, he saw a set of muddy footprints and immediately became convinced that someone had followed him into the house. He was so paranoid that he locked himself into a closet in the front hallway and dialed 911 for help!

  28. Whatever bird was involved, it had short broad wings, so it was not an owl or a buteo or an eagle. Accipiter, or turkey or grouse, would fit the bill…

    1. The wings wouldn’t hit the surface at full-stretch, but near the bottom of their arc (on the first two downstrokes after launch). (I’m only seeing take-off, not landing.)

  30. The drag marks in the tracks got me, until I thought of the Ring Necked Pheasant (Phasianus colchicus). They have a long pointed tail, and being fairly heavy, slap the ground with their wings to get them into the air over the heavy cover that’s their favorite haunt.
    Anybody that’s ever been startled by one of these birds popping into the air right in front of them would know what I mean.
    Sorry, no death in the afternoon.

    1. I’m sure I have no idea what made those marks in the snow, but here’s a video of one of these pheasants taking off:

    2. It does look a bit too orderly to be a predation event… the “wing marks” are perfectly centered on the tracks, for example.

  31. Studying further, it is a male pheasant (Phasianus colchicus). The female’s tail is pointed, while the male carries two long display feathers which would leave the twin tracks as he walked.

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