The watermeadow is flooded again at the moment, but the other day when I went down with my camera, I saw these tracks in Little Venice. I wondered what they were. They have four toes with claws. That rules out the badger, which has five toes. It rules out cats, which can retract their claws, so don’t have claw prints. Obviously not hooves, or the prints of small mammals. So it only leaves dog or fox prints. The difference between the two is that fox prints are smaller and slenderer than dog prints. The other difference is that the two central claw prints curve inwards for foxes and straight ahead for dogs.
This makes things quite exciting as if you look at the top left print you can see that the two central claws have a curve on them, and they are quite small for dogs. So, although I thought that dogs were more likely, as we have a few nearby, Mr C disagrees, on the grounds that dogs are unlikely to venture into our garden and we hear foxes regularly at night. We just haven’t seen one yet.
The jury is out.
