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.
2006Publisher link
Hind Foot Length: An Indicator for Monitoring Roe Deer Populations at a Landscape Scale
Can a deer’s foot tell you how crowded the forest is? Over 13 years, hunters in southwestern France sent in the hind feet of nearly 29,000 roe deer. Fawns grew shorter feet in years when deer were more plentiful, offering managers a cheap way to follow how a population is faring across a whole landscape.
2006PDF available
Individual, Sexual, Seasonal, and Temporal Variation in the Amount of Sagebrush Lizard Scent Marks
Shine a black light on a lizard’s favourite basking rock and its scent marks glow. Researchers collected the marks of 131 captive sagebrush lizards daily over 56 days and found that how much scent a lizard leaves says little about who it is, but a lot about its size, condition and breeding state. The lizards also seemed to top up their marks on a roughly weekly cycle.
2006Publisher link
Influence of drought on predation of elephant (Loxodonta africana) calves by lions (Panthera leo) in an African wooded savannah
Lions rarely take on elephants, but in Zimbabwe’s Hwange National Park elephant calves made up about a fifth of lion kills. By reading bite marks, claw marks and signs of a struggle at carcasses, researchers showed that the kills rose sharply in dry years, when elephants crowd around scarce water and calves get left behind.
2006PDF available
Observer Error in Identifying Species Using Indirect Signs: Analysis of a River Otter Track Survey Technique
For years, Texas wildlife staff searched under bridges for otter tracks and used the results to judge whether the otter population was stable. When a CyberTracker evaluation tested the experienced observers, they missed on average 44% of otter tracks and called 13% of tracks from look-alike species, such as raccoon and opossum, otter. The thesis shows why observer skill must be measured before tracks and signs can be trusted as data.
2006Publisher link
Patterns of den occupation by the spotted hyaena (Crocuta crocuta)
Spotted hyaena families move house about once a month. Over ten years in Kenya’s Maasai Mara, one clan used nearly 100 dens, but kept returning to a few favourites, one of them 12 times. Low-ranking mothers gave birth farther from the shared den and had to carry their cubs farther to reach it.
2006PDF available
Persistence Hunting by Modern Hunter-Gatherers
Can a person really run an antelope to exhaustion? Following !Xo and /Gwi hunters of the central Kalahari through the midday heat, Louis Liebenberg found that persistence hunting succeeded far more often than hunting with bow and arrow, and that the real test was not speed but keeping to the trail. He argues that endurance running and tracking together may have shaped human evolution.
2006Publisher link
Reduction of potential food interference in two sympatric carnivores by sequential use of shared resources
How do two similar-sized carnivores share the same Spanish scrubland without fighting over food? By picking apart nearly 300 scats, researchers found that common genets and stone martens take turns: genets feast on figs in summer while stone martens wait until autumn, and the same seems to happen with strawberry tree fruits and wood mice.
2006PDF available
Scats can reveal the presence and habitat use of cryptic rock-dwelling macropods
Wallabies that hide among the rocks of northern Australia are hard to see but leave plenty of dung behind. Researchers built a measured key to the scats of seven wallaby and wallaroo species, followed how fast scats faded and vanished over two years, and checked scat counts against radio-tracking. Scats proved a good guide to where the animals live and rest, if you know their age and where to look.
2006PDF available
The Importance of Obtaining Verifiable Occurrence Data on Forest Carnivores and an Interactive Website for Archiving Results from Standardized Surveys
People reported fishers all over the forests of Washington, Oregon and California, but when biologists set out cameras and sooted track-plates, fishers turned up in only a few places. Two USDA Forest Service researchers argue that only evidence others can check, such as photos and kept track impressions, should guide conservation, and describe a website built to keep that evidence safe.
2006Publisher link
The Ultimate Sniper: An Advanced Training Manual for Military and Police Snipers
Which way was someone really walking, and how long ago? This military sniper manual includes a chapter on mantracking, with clear methods for counting people from their footprints, ageing tracks and signs by comparing them with your own fresh print, and using a simple marked stick to find the next print. Many of its lessons will be familiar to wildlife trackers.
2006PDF available
The locomotor kinematics of Asian and African elephants: changes with speed and size
Can an elephant run? Filming about 2400 strides from 62 Asian and African elephants, from a baby to adults of over 4.6 tonnes, researchers found that elephants keep the same walking footfall pattern at every speed and never lift all four feet off the ground, yet still reach 6.8 m/s. Their springier hind legs at speed hint at a hidden change of gait, and the study suggests that tales of elephants charging at 11 m/s are exaggerated.
2006PDF available
Using spoor counts to analyse the effect of small stock farming in Namibia on caracal density in the neighbouring Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park
Do caracals leave the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park to raid Namibian sheep farms, as farmers believe? San trackers riding on the bumper of a slow vehicle read a year of caracal spoor along the border and deep inside the park. Caracals mostly stayed away from the border in the hot season but used it more, and crossed the border road, in the cold season, when wild prey is scarce and sheep are lambing.
2005PDF available
An Ethics of Following and the No Road Film: Trackers, Followers and Fanatics
“That stone belong there, been kicked away about 2 hours ago.” In Rolf de Heer’s film The Tracker, one sentence about a turned stone changes how the white Follower sees the Aboriginal tracker he has been doubting. Fiona Probyn reads the film as a “road movie without roads” and asks what it means for settlers to follow knowledge of the land they cannot share.
2005Publisher link
An assessment of the local impact of native predators on an established population of British water voles (Arvicola terrestris)
American mink usually take the blame for Britain’s vanishing water voles, but what about the native hunters? At a Welsh wetland, water vole remains turned up in almost a third of fox scats and nearly a fifth of grey heron pellets in winter. The author argues that foxes, herons and otters may play a bigger part in local water vole losses than has been recognised.
2005PDF available
Are Scat Surveys a Reliable Method for Assessing Distribution and Population Status of Pine Martens?
For decades, Britain judged the status of its pine martens by searching forest trails for their droppings. When DNA was used to check, experienced surveyors had mistaken fox scats for marten scats, and the most accurate of them got every sample from England and Wales wrong. This review explains why scat surveys can mislead, especially where an animal is scarce.
2005PDF available
Beetles in the beech marten Martes foina and pine marten Martes martes diet
What can beetle shells in a marten’s scat reveal? Picking through 766 marten scats from central Poland, researchers identified the beetles martens had eaten, many of them to species. The prey hints that martens find beetles by the rustle of dry leaves, search tree trunks and holes, and in winter probe under loose bark where ground beetles hibernate.
2005Publisher link
Dietary Analysis from Fecal Samples: How Many Scats Are Enough?
How many scats do you need to know what an animal eats? Using thousands of computer simulations and Steller sea lion scats from Alaska, two researchers found that about 60 scats will reveal the main prey, but about 100 are needed to tell whether diets really differ between places or over time. They also warn that where and how scats are collected can matter more than how many.
2005Publisher link
Dietary shifts of the badger (Meles meles) in Mediterranean woodlands: an opportunistic forager with seasonal specialisms
In parts of western Europe badgers are famous earthworm eaters, but what do they eat in the cork oak woodlands of southern Portugal? Two years of scats from badger latrines showed a diet built on olives, figs, pears and beetles, with earthworms in only 5 of 450 scats. The badgers ate whatever was around, but switched to olives whenever olives could be found, much of it fruit from traditional farms.
2005Publisher link
Effect of diet on mass loss of bobcat scat after exposure to field conditions
Does what a bobcat eats change how long their scat lasts on the ground? Researchers fed captive bobcats mice and rats, rabbit or deer, then left the scats out in a Georgia field. After six weeks, deer scats had lost far more mass than the others, which could make deer harder to spot in scat-based diet studies.
2005PDF available
Estimating Site Occupancy and Abundance Using Indirect Detection Indices
Tracking tubes, scent stations and snow track surveys are cheap ways to learn which animals are around, but how much can footprints really tell us about numbers? Two U.S. Geological Survey scientists built a model that turns track-station records into estimates of occupancy and abundance. They show that occupancy estimates hold up well, while one set of scent stations placed too close together counted 508 coyotes where a later mark-resight study estimated 73.
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.