Gait patterns at varying speeds

[Motivated]

I was out on Sunday and came across a different track pattern than I am used to noticing. It was a transverse gallop, then transitioned into a canter. It was in frozen mud, which was somewhat soft when it was deposited.

At first I thought I was looking at a large buck, but then noticed a gap in the footsteps. 1-2-3-4-gap, 1-2-3-4-gap. The gap was 5 feet most of the time, but then once was about 10 feet. All prints were splayed. I have some video that I plan to examine later.

This is an interesting site that I found helpful.

http://vanat.cvm.umn.edu/gaits/transGallop.html

[Dhurtubise]

Nice site. However I surmise that it doesn't apply well to deer tracks. The first thing is that deer walk in their front track (with their back feet). So the tracks end up looking analogous to ours. Any galop will leave a 8-10+ foot gap, even a fawn. I've had some deer running away with 15+ foot gaps

[Motivated]

I hear you about the walking pattern of deer, and the flat out gallop with large 15 foot gaps. I'm good with those. This one was an old track in a frozen muddy lake bed, so the age as hard for me to discern. Definitely not fresh. I was just walking back to the truck and observing tracks, which had no clear edges and were mostly splotchy craters that had filled with rain and frozen. What caught my eye is that I initially thought I was following along an old walking buck track that was old and degraded. Then I hit that gap where I expected another print to be. I could see this mistake happening in poor conditions where individual prints are not super crisp, like some powdery snow track that is melting.

The area is pretty open, so I believe this deer was behind schedule going back to bed, or for some other reason it was moving faster than a walk across the open lake. But not a full gallop, more like a lope or canter. It slowed up near the back and the track pattern changed.

I know now that this was not a walking buck. I'm good with estimating the size of a walking deer based on walking tracks. I'm curious about its size but will likely never know.

It may be time for a track aging experiment in freezing and thawing mud too.