The tracks crossed exactly where my feet had been the evening before, the sand giving me the only clue about who'd been out for a walk that night.
One of my favourite things is to follow the tracks of a badger - me on my way to work, the badger on its way back to its sett. The sandy soil of our reserve at The Lodge (in Sandy, naturally) is pretty good for spotting animal tracks, especially after rain. But I wasn't in Sandy this time, and this was no fox or badger.
They were coyote tracks, and I was on the shore of Lake Erie.
I've just spent a month in the wilds of southern Ontario in Canada, and loved the experience. Conditions were a bit rustic... I didn't have a shower for almost a month (there was no running water) and quickly got used to the regime of pumping water by hand, washing-up by the light of my head-torch and collecting firewood from the beach.
It was my first time in North America. I was bowled over by the spectacle of bird migration (which was the main reason for my visit) and struck by the huge space. It made me realise how hemmed-in we are here in the UK.
Seeing the coyote tracks on the beach, less than 50 m from the cabin where I'd been sleeping, reminded me that we've done away with large predatory mammals in the UK. What would it be like if wolves and bears made a comeback? A walk in the woods could be an awful lot more exciting...
The size of the tracks showed that the feet that made them belonged to a pretty big animal, definitely the size of a large dog. A few days later I got a distant glimpse of the beast itself as it wandered along the shoreline, and a couple of weeks after that heard distant howls of a whole pack of coyotes! Exciting stuff!
I was too far south to encounter any bears but maybe that's something to look for in the future...