Tracking in the Pryors
Clayton H. McCracken

I do not go into the Pryor Mountains to track ATV's.

Dirt scooped out. Much as an adult would scoop from a sand pile while showing a child how to dig a hole.

Another -- shallow, no more than three inches. Dug no deeper than necessary. The soil only recently excavated has not dried. And another scooped out hole. And still more across this southeast slope above the steep and rugged side of the limestone canyon. A late April day. Phlox, one or two flowers on a cushion. Lomatium cous, biscuitroot, the double-umbelled flowers close to the ground and still green. Only a tint of yellow. The shallow holes not deep enough to reach the biscuitroot's nourishing taproot. Two or three dark green parallel veined leaves now emerging from the still damp pale red soil. Yes, it smells like an onion and the taste is unmistakable. A black bear, moving across this slope yesterday, had with precision and no wasted motion dug a meal of onions.

Further up at another site near the canyon's rim a prickly pear cactus had been gnawed to the ground. Then others, eaten to various heights, came into view. Not a place for porcupines or what ever might chew on a plant protected by sharp spines. Insects? Definitely not. Then it registered that by each ground-leveled cactus was a pile of pellets. The twice-digested plant material crumbled while being measured. The round pellets consistently 8 to 8.5 mm. This is mid range for a mountain cottontail. The pellets of a jackrabbit range 10 to 17 mm.

Rabbits and jackrabbits defecate a few pellets at a time. Never the shotgun evacuation of a deer. To produce these double handfuls of pellets means the animal sat there chewing away at the cactus for a long time. How long does it take to eat an entire prickly pear cactus?

It is difficult to imagine a cottontail eating a prickly pear cactus. A jackrabbit I could accept, but how might one account for the pellets being smaller than the quoted reference? Cactus stems are juicy, full of moisture, that is when the moisture is available along these dry slopes of the Pryors -- winter and early spring. When more moisture relative to fiber is ingested, the scat is softer, can be smaller diameter and upon drying crumbles easily as did these pellets. The more fiber relative to moisture the scat is larger, firmer, and less likely to crumble. That explains how a jackrabbit might produce pellets of smaller diameter than 10 to 17 mm.

A tuft of hair caught in cactus spines provides further clues. The soft fur all gray. The guard hairs, half of them tipped a creamy off-white, the other half tipped jet black. The form, the jackrabbit's resting bed, was tucked deeply underneath the lowest limbs of a juniper.

In mammal identification books the black-tailed jackrabbit is inevitably depicted beside a cactus. I would like to believe our cactus eater was a black-tailed jackrabbit, Lepus californicus -- another Californian escaping to the Rocky Mountain West. Probably not. None of the jackrabbits I have seen high tailing over sagebrush in the Pryors have had a black tail. The Pryor Mountains being at the Montana-Wyoming border, are north of blacktail's reported range.

The intent of the black bear and of the white-tailed jackrabbit are easy to read. More difficult to read is the intent of a man riding on an ATV.

The trail laid down by the tires of the ATV is easy to follow. The treads had pressed down into the clayey soil. Chevrons, designed to splay mud outward thereby preventing the treads from clogging, point opposite the direction traveled. The margins of the impression are steep. Between the chevrons the soil is a sharp ridge. No wind or rain has softened the track. Just as the black bear, the ATV was here yesterday.

I came upon these ATV tracks as I was weaseling a black-sagebrush community -- going whichever way my noise pointed, looking here and there for the emerging buttercups. The ATV had traveled along a partially overgrown two-track. A limber pine growing between the two tracks indicated that the road had not been used for twenty years -- the time it would take for the pine to grow to its present size. A dirt filled depression and rusting pipe told that a rancher once attempted to bring water to his cattle. It was he, driving his pickup across the sagebrush, who created this two-track. The two-track now has no purpose. It cuts across the landscape from one established road to another.

What was the intent of the driver of the ATV as he reopened a healing scar? The tracks give no clue.

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References on jackrabbit scat:
Elbroch, Mark. Mammal Tracks and Signs, 2003, Page 507
Halfpenny, James. Scats and Tracks of the Rocky Mountains, 2001. Pages 16 and 20.
Special thanks to Jim Halfpenny who helped interpret the jackrabbit scat.
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The day the OLE BUZZARD Society was founded