It’s my best guess that this was an owl landing and then walking off to the left.

To refer back to Hank’s comment again, the wing marks are not from the initial strike (Owls strike feet first with wings aloft) but from brief contact with the snow as the owl flew off…the second partial set of feather prints just forward and offset from the main print may be the tips of the primaries barely hitting again on the second wing-beat.

Here’s my take: *if* it’s fake, they took a photograph of the tracks of a running dog, and copied and pasted it with a bit of blurring onto a photograph of the owl print *or* onto the image of the snowy landscape and edited a photograph of the owl print in separately.

The picture looks darned real, and my initial instinct was to accept it as legitimate, but I feel less certain now. The thing that didn’t sit right with me originally was the total lack of any apparent change in gait or pressure at the site of the alleged capture. I initially attributed this to the general obliviousness of domestic dogs, but it still doesn’t feel 100% right. It’s perhaps also worth noting that neither the owl prints nor the dog prints overlap with the tree shadows in the background, permitting more wiggle-room for stitching photos together. The other thing that bugs me is that while it’s an awfully large bird print, I’m still skeptical about it being large enough to take a dog that would leave the size of track depicted. I haven’t seen any real-life examples, though, so my instincts could be dead wrong there.

On the other hand, the type of scene depicted *does* occur, and someone somewhere is *bound* to have a legitimate photograph of the snowprints a raptor taking a small dog. With that fact in mind, it seems pretty lame to try to fake such a photograph, and I’m more inclined to say that it’s legitimate.

Thoughts?

Of course, stranger things have happened and I don’t live in a snowy area, so I’m hardly an expert.

I think Hank has it pretty well bagged. Small prints are definitely mouse, judging from the shape maybe deer mouse? Squirrel tracks are usually staggered.

Using mouse tracks as a rough scale (otherwise absent from the photo) for the messy larger tracks, rabbit seems like a good guess. Owl prints often look too-sharp to be true, only because the wings might only hit the snow for a split-second. Compare to other pictures of owl snow-prints. Owls can and will happily take prey from the front, one of the many advantages they enjoy being silent nocturnal aerial predators.

The rabbit was coming in from the upper left and just barely turned slightly as the owl hit it, the owl’s wings came down onto the snow with its next flap as it lifted off carrying the rabbit.

This isn’t at all a rare thing to _see_ after an overnight snow. Quite common, if you go out early and look. It’s a wonderful rare picture though.