KRISTAN McKINNE hiked down a wintry hillside near Lancaster and pointed with a mittened hand. Scat.

She wasn't instructing a cat to vamoose. She'd spotted the pelletlike droppings left by a deer.

Droppings. Tufts of feathers. Nibbled-off twigs. Antler marks scribed on the bark of a tree. They're all clues in the animal-tracking game.

And winter, with its starker, more open sightlines, is a great time to play detective, said naturalist Lisa J. Sanchez, who's teaming with McKinne to offer a winter wildlife-tracking hike.

The outing at the Lancaster County Conservancy's Windolph Landing Nature Preserve, off Second Lock Road in Lancaster Township, is free and open to children and adults. It will be held 2-3:30 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 24.

It combines the resources of the conservancy (McKinne) and the Lancaster County Department of Parks and Recreation (Sanchez) in an effort to introduce people to the county's natural lands. And its denizens.

"I do the education," Sanchez said. "They provide the property."

The LCC is also serving up new, downloadable maps to help visitors navigate its two dozen public preserves; parking space and trails are being created at four additional preserves. (For a look at the group's debut online hiking guide, "Visit the Natural Side of Lancaster County," please see related story, page G2.)

If Mother Nature smiles on the 24th, the tracking terrain will be dusted with a fresh coat of snow. That's what happened a couple of weeks ago, the night before McKinne reconnoitered Windolph Landing.

By early afternoon, a strong wind was playing the tree branches like creaky fiddles. Woodpecker calls punctuated the concert.

McKinne noted some canine tracks on the trail and then descended to an open flat bordering the Conestoga River. The air was calmer there, and the green meadow grasses were still coated with white.



A RACCOON had signed the snowy register. A few yards away, McKinne examined the three-pronged marks of a small bird. Thin lines were drawn into the snow behind each print, as if the animal had dragged its feet.

"That's a real cool one," McKinne said. "I've never seen a print like that before.

"That's the fun of it," she said of the mystery. On past hikes, she added, participants' questions about animals invariably led to questions about shrubs and trees.

That's where Sanchez comes in.

The naturalist grew up hiking and camping - and tracking with her hunter grandfather. Today, she said, on travels through the woods it's second nature for her to decipher bits and pieces of animal biography.

Some of the narratives reflect pedestrian chores: a whitetail made a pit stop here. Others point to life-and-death drama. A varmint became a red-tailed's lunch on this spot.

Sanchez said she's come upon such signposts often: First you see the tracks of a rodent. "And then you see the wing imprint of a hawk and then you don't see the rodent tracks anymore."

Tracking is just a "big egg hunt," the naturalist added. "You're out here looking for something that's a different color, something that's a little bit off. That different thing could be a skull lying on the ground."

But you have to be searching. And most of us aren't born to it.

Because we're conditioned to just look forward and thrust one foot in front of the other, Sanchez said, "We typically walk with our heads down."

She encourages people simply to stand up straight and scan from side to side as they walk.

Those squashed-down leaves? A deer bedded there. That walnut busted into 100 pieces? Chewed by a ground squirrel.

Had a flying squirrel consumed the morsel, Sanchez said, you'd find a single neat bore hole in the hull.

"I often say a flying squirrel is smarter because it goes right to the meat."

And, yes, Sanchez confirmed, there are flying squirrels here. It's just that they're nocturnal and people hardly ever see them.

But Windolph Landing in this cold season is a potential animal crossroads, according to Sanchez.

The woodlot just a few miles from downtown Lancaster is stuffed with hackberry, sycamore, oak, walnut and maple, a veritable cafeteria for wildlife.

"There's some great deer trails," Sanchez said, but many other critters are also likely to be out and about, hunting and leaving their calling cards.

"I think a lot of people think, ‘Well, everything hibernates' " in winter, Sanchez said. Not so. Foxes are active all year; also shrews, voles, mice and owls. And a spectrum of birds.

The gangly John Hancock of the great blue heron would be a feather in a tracker's cap at Windolph Landing, Sanchez said.

"I like the oppossum [track], which you don't see too often. It looks like a little hand."

The search itself is the true prize. This track. That scat.

Hold your hand over an animal deposit to check for warmth, Sanchez suggested. "If it's still steaming, you've just missed it."

To register, call the Lancaster County Conservancy, 392-7891, by Wednesday, Jan. 22.


Hiking guide
The Lancaster County Conservancy has launched an interactive hiking guide to lead visitors to its preserves and help them find their way around the sites.
Called "Visit the Natural Side of Lancaster County," the guide was developed by Nxtbook Media with a grant from the Lancaster County Community Foundation.
Available at lancasterconservancy.org/preserveguide, the guide is based on the LCC's conventional printed version.
But it's more versatile, according to Kristan McKinne, the group's communications director.
You can flip through the pages electronically and download a trail map to make a printout.
Quick links allow you to e-mail a page to a friend or share it via networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn.
"The main goal was to make [the land] accessible" and more visible to the public, McKinne said. Until now, for example, you could live in the city and easily miss the fact that "Windolph Landing is five minutes away."

Jon Rutter is a Sunday News staff writer. E-mail him at jrutter@lnpnews.com