[Moose]

We spent the weekend on the Duckabush River Trail and came across these rather fresh tracks in the snow. Can someone ID the animal? At first we thought cougar, but realized that cats only have four digits. Our best guess is black bear, but we didn't see the longer rear track that the internet tells us to expect. Thanks!

[robertjoy]

FIVE TOES! That's a clue. Bear or wolverine ?

[Jaberwock]

Cool ! Looks like a cougar that didn't perfectly direct register it's back feet where it's front had been. Sometimes if they're looking to the side while walking you'll get this. Or tired. Or lazy.. The bottom right print in your photo shows 4 toes registering and a classic 3 lobbed heel pad of the cougar.

You can read up on cougar tracks here: http://www.bear-tracker.com/cougar.html And here's a excerpt off that site with a photo of what you encountered (bottom photo)

[Tom]

[Moose]

Brilliant! And the direct register info is fascinating - we never would have thought about that. Like the excerpt says, we were comparing the prints we saw with perfect single prints. My next question is - how fresh do you think these tracks were? Can you tell by the photos? We followed the tracks for at least another ten minutes as the cougar had followed the trail. We then ran into a pair of hikers coming back down the trail. The male hiker agreed that it looked like cougar tracks, but he believed the tracks were old. We're not experts so went with his opinion; however, the tracks seemed to lie on top of the hikers' boot prints and were perfectly intact on the trail up until they disappeared, which led us to believe that the tracks were quite fresh. You would think that if the tracks were older, the hikers ahead of us would have obliterated at least a few of them?

[DigitalJanitor]

Depends a lot on freeze/thaw snow conditions, but with the cat tracks over the hiker tracks I suppose one could estimate sometime in the last 24 hours assuming at least one person goes out every day. Big kitties everywhere there's enough food for them. They're awfully stealthy, so often this is all you'll see.

[captain jack]

The cougar saw you long before you would have seen it. Just be grateful there are plenty of elk (aka cougar Big Macs) in the park.