BURLINGTON, Vt. (WCAX) - With some fresh snow on the ground, it’s a good time to get outside and see what critters are in your backyard.

A loping skunk track is easy to identify but hard to describe. Four individual prints are shaped in an unfinished "W" or like this ' , ' , viewed sideways. Trust me, once you see it, you'll know it.

A light, fluffy snow lay atop the old, hard snow, making excellent conditions for finding animal tracks. It’s always fun to see if we can figure out what the critters were doing.

One of my winter pleasures is traipsing around after a nice snowfall and looking for animal tracks. In mid-January, I walked up my driveway to the mailbox and crossed a clear trail left by a ...

ABOVE: Participants in a previous Trails and Tracks in the Snow outing, sponsored by Laramie Audubon Society, pause as Dr. Gary Beauvais, center, explains the tracks in the snow and the animal’s ...

As I walked through the snow to refill covered feeders on the brutally cold days, I saw lots of animal tracks. White-tailed deer tracks were, of course, the most abundant, especially by the heated ...

“The wonderful thing about snow is that it holds stories! One of the stories it tells is in the form of animal tracks,” officials wrote in a post shared Feb. 16 on Facebook.

When the snow melts, it exposes rocks and vegetation that absorb more of the sun’s heat and further contribute to melting. These uncovered areas also make it possible to find fossils.