Your neighborhood is home to all sorts of amazing animals, from racoons, squirrels and skunks to birds, bugs and snails. Even if you don’t see them, most of these creatures are leaving evidence of their activities all around you.Paw prints in different shapes and sizes are clues to the visitors who pass through. The shapes of tunnels and mounds in your yard carry the mark of their builders.Even the stuff animals leave behind, whether poop or skeletons, tells you something about the wilder side of the neighborhood.Tree squirrels can excavate small holes all over a yard to hide seeds and nuts or when searching for them. Ground squirrels also create burrows. Snowmanradio/Wikimedia Commons, CC BYI’m a zoologist and director of the Hefner Museum of Natural History at Miami University of Ohio, where we work with all kinds of wildlife specimens. With a little practice, you’ll soon notice a lot more evidence of your neighborhood friends when you step outside.What makes those animal tracks?You can learn a lot from a nice, crisp paw print.AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementThe dog family, including coyotes and foxes, can be differentiated from the cat family by the shape of their palm pads — triangular for dogs, two lobes at the peak for cats.Both opossums and raccoons leave prints that look like those of a tiny human, but the opossum thumb is held at nearly right angles to the rest of the fingers.Opossum, left, and raccoon tracks. Like humans, opossums have opposable thumbs. Steven SullivanNot all prints are so clear, however.Invasive rats and native squirrels have prints that often look pretty similar to each other. Water erosion of a skunk print left in mud might connect the toe tips to the palm, making it look more like a raccoon. And prints left in winter slush by the smallest dog in the neighborhood can grow through freezing and thawing to proportions that make people wonder whether wolves have returned to their former haunts.AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementThere are good reference books where you can learn more about track analysis, and it can be fun to go down the rabbit h …
