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Lake-Lehman wins first District 2 Duals wrestling title since 2004

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Tom Tigue remembered as “humble”, “straight shooter”

<p>Nothing can hide its presence from the snow. No matter how small a creature may be, how lightly it may step, a fresh blanket of snow will reveal its presence.</p><p>A recent walk along a beaver pond after last weekend&#8217;s snowfall confirmed a flurry of activity after the storm had passed.</p><p>Deer appeared to be the most active visitors to the site. Several sets of tracks meandered down the wooded hillside to the beaver pond, and the deer didn&#8217;t hesitate to venture onto the snow-covered ice.</p><p>There was no food source on the frozen pond and certainly no shelter to attract the deer. Yet they spent a bit of time on the ice, making figure-eight patterns in the snow before moving back into the woods.</p><p>I guessed they were drawn to the pond for the same reason I was: curiosity. With that motive in mind, I walked around the dam and up an adjacent hillside to meet the stream several hundred yards below the pond. There, an old bridge built years ago to connect a logging road across the stream provided a good starting point for a walk back up to the beaver pond. The bridge also served as another prime spot to find tracks of a certain furbearer.</p><p>In the snow next to one of the small, stone abutments used as a base of the bridge was a series of tracks about as wide as a fist. The tracks carved out a neat channel in the deep snow, and they revealed a lot about what this particular mink had been up to the night before.</p><p>At the stone abutment, the mink poked around into every crevice in the rocks, no doubt searching for something to eat. The channel of tracks &#8211; which was actually formed by the mink&#8217;s body as it burrowed across the snow in that loping gait that is exclusive to members of the weasel family, paralleled the stream along the thin shelf of ice bordering the flowing water. When the bank of the stream became steep and the ice shelf narrowed, the trail of tracks plunged right into the water, surfacing again when the ice widened.</p><p>The mink continued to go in and out of the stream until it crossed on a fallen log and poked around the uprooted stump at its base. Small fans of dirt strewn across the snow indicated the mink had been digging in the stump, and then its path veered away from the stream channel and up the bank.</p><p>And this is what always amazes me about mink. The bank was only about a foot high and sloped gently away from the stream. But rather than take the easy way up, the mink elected to slink between two large rocks bordering the stream and wind around a third stone before reaching the top. For some reason, mink always prefer the tightest, narrowest routes during their jaunts along a stream.</p><p>Once on land, the tracks followed a small tributary that still flowed freely. Halfway up the tracks turned sharply into the woods where the mink investigated a trail left by a deer mouse that happened to pass by during the night. Luckily for this mouse, its path never crossed with the mink.</p><p>As the tributary reached its source at the upper end of the beaver dam, the mink walked right across the top of the structure, poked around the beaver lodge and turned sharply into the blueberry bushes that surrounded the frozen pond. It was a good move as the mink would&#8217;ve been vulnerable to predators had it chosen to cut straight across the barren ice sheet that covered the pond.</p><p>Following the tracks through the bushes, the mink found the safety of open water again where the stream entered the pond. As expected, the tracks disappeared into the water and the curious mink continued its nighttime trek up the mountain stream.</p><style>
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<div class="neCaption">Venesky </div></div><div class="metaInfo"><photo0>https://www.timesleader.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/web1_Venesky-1.jpg</photo0><caption0>Venesky </caption0><photoCredit0></photoCredit0></div></div>
<div class="metaInfo"><bylineMeta><p>By Tom Venesky</p><p>tvenesky@www.timesleader.com</p></bylineMeta></div><div class="metaInfo"><shirttailMeta><p>Reach Tom Venesky at 570-991-6395 or on Twitter @TLTomVenesky</p></shirttailMeta></div>

Outdoors with Tom Venesky: Tracks tell the story