Sunday, February 22, 2009

Possible Sighting

We got some fliers posted yesterday, which is great.  We're grateful for the help of the volunteers who came out and gave up part of their Saturday to help us.  But the bigger news is the possible sighting.

The person who saw the dog did not get a great look at it, but he did say it was a white dog with some black markings on its back.  It was on one of the hiking trails in the woods behind Upshur St.  The reasons I bumped this up to an actual sighting from a "maybe" are that we know Lucy has been in and out of that patch of woods, it would explain where she was for the few days since our previous sighting, and there's sock evidence.  Oh yes, sock evidence.

Not too far off one of the trails in that area, about a week earlier, we had set up a scent/feeding station, along with a motion-sensor camera.  We laid out a t-shirt and a few socks, unwashed and stinky the way Lucy likes them, scattered some food around there, and set up the camera.  The camera snapped a lovely picture of empty air, and all the food was gone the next day.  We never replenished the food when we retrieved the camera, but we left the laundry.

Shortly after the sighting yesterday, Sarah found one of the socks in the middle of the trail, nowhere near where the station had been.  And it had Lucy hairs all over it.

Now, obviously the hairs could have been on it when we left it out there; neither of us can remember for certain.  And several possibilities could explain how the sock moved.  So we're not getting our hopes too high.  But I think the sock hadn't had any hair on it, and the wind and rain of Wed. and Thurs. would have taken most of it off anyway (and the wind couldn't have blown the sock down the hill and up and around the path to where it was found).  And this is what Lucy does.  She takes a sock out of the laundry basket and carries it around the house a bit until it falls out of her mouth, or she sits down with it between her paws.

If you know Lucy, you can probably picture her running around the woods with one of my socks dangling from her mouth.

So, in the end, we moved one of the traps over to this area, just outside the woods, hoping she'll emerge right nearby.  Here's hoping...

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