TRACKING LITERATURE
The Tracking Literature library gathers research on tracks and signs, trailing, and animal behaviour and ecology, together with related fields such as human tracking, forensics, ichnology and taphonomy. Behaviour and natural history papers are here even when they never mention tracking, because understanding behaviour matters to trackers.
Search every field, or narrow the list with the filters. Each paper has its own page with a synopsis, keywords and the full citation. Where a paper is open access, or the authors or publisher have given permission, you can download the PDF; otherwise the page links to the publisher or a legal free copy.
1998Publisher link
Spoor counts as indices of large carnivore populations: the relationship between spoor frequency, sampling effort and true density
Do more tracks on the road really mean more animals? In northern Namibia, Ju/Hoansi San trackers counted leopard, lion and wild dog spoor while the true number of animals was known from individual recognition. Spoor density rose in a straight line with true density, but lions and wild dogs, which travel farther each day, left more spoor per animal than leopards.
1997PDF available
Tracking and the interpretation of spoor: a scientifically sound method in ecology
Can tracking stand up to scientific testing? In this landmark study in Namibia, a biologist watched lions, leopards, cheetahs and their prey, then four Ju/’Hoan San trackers, all co-authors, reconstructed what happened from spoor alone. They were right in 98% of 569 cases, including identifying known individual animals and working out that a zebra had died of disease before lions fed on it.
1996Publisher link
Long-term scatterhoarding by Eurasian red squirrels (Sciurus vulgaris)
How many seeds does a red squirrel bury in a year? In two Belgian woodlands, researchers counted the small dig holes squirrels leave when they recover their buried food. Each squirrel hid about 2,300 to 2,800 pine cones, acorns and beechnuts a year, and found most of them again, carrying it through the lean months of late winter and spring.
1995Publisher link
Eagle involvement in accumulation of the Taung child fauna
Who killed the Taung child? The first ape-man fossil ever found, a toddler about 3 to 4 years old, was long thought to belong to a cave of bone-smashing hunters. By comparing feeding damage on the fossils with bones from beneath modern eagle nests, Berger and Clarke argued that the killer was a large eagle.
1990Publisher link
The Art of Tracking: The Origin of Science
Could tracking be where science began? In this landmark book, Louis Liebenberg draws on hunts with !Xo trackers in the Kalahari to argue that reading tracks and signs uses the same creative reasoning as modern physics: imagining what an animal did, predicting where its trail will lead, and revising the idea when the ground says otherwise.
About the library
What is the Tracking Literature library?
A searchable collection of research papers on tracks and signs, trailing, and animal behaviour and ecology, gathered by Original Wisdom. Each paper has its own page with a plain-language summary, keywords, the full citation and a link to the paper.
Can I download the papers?
Where a paper is open access, or the authors or publisher have given permission, you can download the PDF from its page. Otherwise the page links to the publisher or to a legal free copy.
Who writes the summaries?
Kersey Lawrence of Original Wisdom summarises each paper: what the researchers did, found and concluded, how tracking was used, who did the tracking, and what it means for trackers.
How do I find papers on one species or place?
Type it in the search box, which searches every field including scientific names, or tick it in the Species or Region filter. Filters combine, so you can narrow the list to, for example, leopard papers from Botswana.
How should I cite a paper or a summary?
Each paper page gives the full citation and DOI of the original paper, and a ready-made citation for Original Wisdom's summary of it.