‘Never seen anything like this before’: P.A. resident baffled by unusual tracks in snow

“Later when we were leaving….just out of curiosity I walked along her front sidewalk. I thought this is so unusual. They come from her driveway to a point at the sidewalk and then off toward the pathway.”

Heidt-Dubray added she knew about the heavy snowfall forecast and wanted to document the photos to show her husband.

“I created a monster, because he got very interested,” she said. “We looked for similar images online, and we saw some that definitely resembled a bird, but they weren’t as intricate as these were.”

Heidt-Dubray’s leading theory is the tracks were made by a magpie.

“Just a week or two prior my husband was visiting his mother, and they were looking out the window and they saw a magpie…he said it looked like it was burying something in the snow and it kept going around and around and you could see the wing marks in the snow, so that’s what he suspected,” she said.

(Submitted photo/Janice Heidt-Dubray)

But Karen Wiebe, an ornithologist and retired biology professor from the University of Saskatchewan, said she has doubts as to whether the tracks were made by a bird at all.

“There’s no sign of any ‘bird footprint tracks,’ and the snow is quite shallow so one would expect to see some tracks with this large number of imprints,” Wiebe wrote in an email. “And the round circles with feather-like projections in a long line appear to be too regular to be made by a bird. Not sure what made these.”

Wiebe pointed to a blog post that shows a typical magpie imprint, noting that they’re often messy and not in straight lines.

“Also there is a deep divet/bare patch in the middle of the feather circles where the bird’s body and feet would have broken through the snow when it lifted off from the ground again…something not apparent in the photos you sent,” she wrote.

The tracks are long gone now after Prince Albert was hit with a snowstorm last weekend. Heidt-Dubray remains puzzled as to what (or who) left the impressions.

“I’ve never seen anything like this before,” she said. “I’ve seen deer tracks going across her yard and they’ve got a rabbit that lives in the vicinity, but nothing like this. It comes from the driveway almost to the front sidewalk and then off. I don’t know it’s just very unusual.”

Heidt-Dubray said there’s one more theory, courtesy of her husbands’s co-worker.

“He’s a real outdoorsman…he’s travelled to the east coast to study bears and all kinds of stuff,” she said. “And when he looked at the pictures, he said he thinks they’re aliens or homeless aliens. Nobody seems to know what caused these,” she laughed.

(Submitted photo/Janice-Heidt-Dubray)

nolan.kowal@pattisonmedia.com

by Nolan Kowal

‘Never seen anything like this before’: P.A. resident baffled by unusual tracks in snow

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