My son, Nicholas, heard me speaking about the various animals I often saw in the evenings visiting our backyard.  He really wanted to see them but his bed time is before they usually visit so I said let’s see if we can get some tracks of the animals so you will know who was here.

We went to work making some mud then putting it into a low flat pan we had in the garage.  Nicholas wanted to test it out first and made his own tracks.

Next we smoothed out the mud again and placed it at the bottom of our deck stairs hoping one of our nightly visitors would walk through it.  We sprinkled some dry cat food on the steps to increase the chances someone would walk through the mud.

Nicholas grudgingly went to bed and woke up the next morning eager to see who had visited the night before and someone had …

We got out our trusty Camp Out book by Lynn Brunelle, to see if we could identify the tracks of our night-time visitor.  Here is our guess …

I think we will try this again, perhaps with some different bait next time and see if we can entice anyone else to walk through or “tracking” mud.