Monthly Archives: March 2019

Photo of the Week – March 1, 2019

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The snow on the ground is slowing down some of our plans for March, but I do appreciate the opportunity to do some more winter photography. It’s also nice to have snow around as a way to gauge the kind of animal activity going on in the prairie. As I walked around the Platte River Prairies last weekend, I particularly noted an abundance of small mammal tracks. Once I started noticing and photographing the tracks, I saw more and more, so I just kept photographing them. As a result, I came home with an absurd number of mouse track photos.

No tracks in this photo, but this gives you a feel for what the afternoon was like on Sunday at the Platte River Prairies – attractive diffuse clouds in the sky and sparkling snow on the ground. A perfect day to obsess over a narrow range of photographic subject matter.

I’m only sharing a small subset of those track photos today. It may be difficult for some of you to appreciate the subtle differences between the photos, which, at first glance might appear nearly identical to each other. I tried to provide explanations in the captions for why each image is absolutely unique and worth sharing. It’s not just because I took a lot of very similar photos and felt compelled to justify that by sharing more than just one or two. Seriously, I could have filled the rest of your day with mouse tracks, but I restrained myself. Enjoy.

While I saw a lot of mouse tracks like this, including some that led to burrows in the snow, I didn’t see any evidence of what the mice were eating (if anything) while they were out and about.
This photo is really different from the previous one in that you can see the individual toe prints. Also, the tracks move from top left to bottom right of the frame instead of top right to bottom left…
THIS photo is different from the previous two because it was photographed later in the day when the sun was lower and providing more golden-colored light.
As the sun neared the horizon, I was still taking photos of mouse tracks. And yes, most of the other images were pretty similar to each other. But THIS one has a sun in it!