Winter walk in dry Woods, via the SW Gate. Cold late afternoon, twenty F but felt far colder. Gray skies and north winds. Quiet. Most everyone who could be indoors, was indoors.
Good time to explore off the beaten path. Find something new. East of the NW Pond and 70 feet east of Walnut Jct, there is still a hanging 'thistle' bird feeder.
All the leaf litter and organic soil around the nearby grove of five catalpas has been heavily turned over by a foraging armadillo ... looking for pecans, snails? Small group of three white-tailed deer moving northwest from Hackberry Alley. Tough time for larger animals. How to shelter against the day's cold, what to eat? How to live if you cannot hide or hibernate? The SW quarter of the Woods is filled with broken tops of ash trees, leaves still attached from the windstorms of summer. The well-used Main SW path has become a 'latrine' for some mammal, a fox? coyote? racoon? bobcat? Need to photo scat and figure it out. All will be washed away with first good rain. Leaving, I notice something I've not seen before in the Woods, piles of freshly turned dirt, gophers. The disturbed soil extended back to the south and the weedy drier ground outside the southern boundary.
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