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.
2018PDF available
Description of Bird Tracks from the Kitadani Formation (Aptian), Katsuyama, Fukui, Japan with Three-Dimensional Imaging Techniques
In the Early Cretaceous, birds walked across the muddy banks of a river in what is now Fukui, Japan. Using handheld 3D scanners, researchers described two of their footprints, one with a small web between the toes, and showed how they told these bird tracks apart from those of small dinosaurs. The tracks may come from two medium-sized kinds of bird, adding to the little that is known about Early Cretaceous birds in Japan.
2018PDF available
Determining the numbers of a landscape architect species (Tapirus terrestris), using footprints
Adult lowland tapirs have no spots or stripes to tell them apart, so how do you count them without catching them? On dirt roads in Brazil’s Atlantic Forest, researchers photographed 440 tapir footprints and let footprint-measuring software sort them by individual. They found at least 29 tapirs, some of them travelling between sites up to 4.5 km apart through plantations and farmland.
2018PDF available
Fisher Predation on Canada Lynx in the Northeastern United States
Can a fisher, at about half its weight, kill a Canada lynx? In northern Maine, researchers following radio-collared lynx for 12 years read the story in the snow: fisher tracks leading to lynx beds, drag marks, caches and bite marks. In the first study to document fishers killing lynx, fishers killed 14 of them, mostly in winter and in mature conifer forest.
2018PDF available
Gathering the Kalahari: Tracking Landscapes in Motion
What does tracking mean when hunting is banned? Walking for a year with four San Master Trackers in Botswana’s Kalahari, anthropologist Pierre du Plessis found them tracking everything: gemsbok, aardvarks, desert truffles hidden in the sand, termites cutting grass, and a lost pan known only from stories. He argues that tracking is a way of reading whole landscapes in motion, at a time when fences, cattle and gas prospecting are closing a vital wildlife corridor.
2018PDF available
Genetic insights into dispersal distance and disperser fitness of African lions (Panthera leo) from the latitudinal extremes of the Kruger National Park, South Africa
How far does a young lion wander before settling down? Using DNA from 109 lions at the far ends of Kruger National Park, researchers found that females mostly stayed within about 20 km of home, while some males travelled 75 to 200 km. Dispersers tended to be in poorer condition, which may matter for how diseases such as bovine tuberculosis spread.
2018Publisher link
Hourly movement decisions indicate how a large carnivore inhabits developed landscapes
How do black bears live among houses and highways in Connecticut? By following GPS-collared females hour by hour, researchers found that bears in the most built-up areas moved into neighbourhoods more, yet steered clear of roads and became warier as traffic picked up, especially mothers with cubs. Rather than simply getting used to people, these bears appear to live alongside us by carefully avoiding danger.
2018PDF available
How Behavior of Nontarget Species Affects Perceived Accuracy of Scat Detection Dog Surveys
When a scat detection dog brings researchers to a “cougar” scat that DNA says belongs to a coyote, was the dog wrong? Trials with captive coyotes, trail cameras and a trained dog showed that coyotes and other animals urine-mark, carry and even eat cougar scats, putting their own DNA on top while the cougar’s smell remains. The dog may have been right all along.
2018PDF available
Inter-stride variability triggers gait transitions in mammals and birds
Why does a walking animal suddenly break into a trot? Comparing nine species, from opossums and dogs to otters and ostriches, researchers found that saving energy does not explain the timing. Instead, animals seem to switch gait when their strides grow uneven, moving into a steadier rhythm that may help them avoid tripping or falling.
2018PDF available
Late Ediacaran Trackways Produced by Bilaterian Animals with Paired Appendages
More than 540 million years ago, a small animal crossed the sea floor in what is now South China and left two rows of tracks, each only 1 to 2 mm across. These are the oldest known trackways made by an animal with paired legs. By reading the tracks the way a tracker would, the authors show the animal may have walked on top of the mat and then burrowed beneath it.
2018PDF available
Motion-triggered video cameras reveal spatial and temporal patterns of red fox foraging on carrion provided by mountain lions
Would you risk dinner beside a mountain lion? In the snowy Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, video cameras at 232 mountain lion kills showed that red foxes do, especially in winter. Foxes came to more kills, in bigger numbers, and fed for longer in winter, often while the big cat was still nearby, suggesting hunger can outweigh fear.
2018PDF available
Terminal Pleistocene epoch human footprints from the Pacific coast of Canada
About 13,000 years ago, at least three people, one of them probably a child, walked barefoot across a muddy shore on Canada’s Pacific coast. Archaeologists digging under a beach on Calvert Island found 29 of their footprints pressed into an ancient clay soil, read their size, toes and slips, and told them apart from bear tracks. The prints are among the oldest signs of people on this coast at the end of the last ice age.
2018PDF available
The importance of fieldwork over predictive modeling in quantifying predation events of carnivores marked with GPS technology
GPS collars tell researchers where a puma stopped, but not whether it made a kill. By visiting almost 1,900 puma clusters on foot in Chile, Colorado and California, CyberTracker-certified field teams showed that the computer models researchers use to save fieldwork can badly miscount kills and miss small prey. The authors conclude that there is still no substitute for reading the signs on the ground.
2018PDF available
The role of middens in white rhino olfactory communication
A white rhino midden is more than a pile of dung: it is a noticeboard. Video cameras at 10 middens in Hluhluwe-iMfolozi Park showed that territorial males visit most, drop small piles only in the centre and spend much of their time sniffing their own dung, while females and passing males leave theirs around the edges. Who left the dung, and where, seems to be part of the message.
2018Publisher link
Track Plates Detect the Endangered New Mexico Jumping Mouse
The endangered New Mexico jumping mouse has unusually long feet, and that turns out to be the key to finding it without a trap. Researchers in Arizona and New Mexico built US$5 ink track plates from a plastic shoebox and found that the mouse’s footprints matched live-trapping results at 15 of 16 sites, with no risk of injury to the animals.
2018Publisher link
Use of track counts and camera traps to estimate the abundance of roe deer in North-Eastern Italy: are they effective methods?
Counting roe deer in Italian forests usually means dozens of hunters driving the woods. In six game reserves, two trackers counting fresh tracks on transects with CyberTracker produced estimates that tracked the hunters’ counts closely, at about 28% less cost than camera traps. The authors also show how to tell roe deer footprints from wild boar and red deer.
2018PDF available
Using footprints to identify and sex giant pandas
Giant pandas all look alike on camera, and telling males from females is hard even up close. By photographing the footprints of 41 captive pandas and measuring them in special software, researchers could tell individuals apart about 90% of the time, and sex from a whole trail 91% of the time. The authors see it as a low-cost way to keep watching reintroduced pandas after their GPS collars drop off.
2018Publisher link
Verifying bilby presence and the systematic sampling of wild populations using sign-based protocols – with notes on aerial and ground survey techniques and asserting absence
Is that a bilby’s digging, or a goanna’s? Five Australian bilby researchers set out which tracks and signs can confirm a greater bilby and which only hint at one: three parallel toe marks, scats in digging spoil and roots ripped open for grubs say “bilby”, while gait, open diggings and burrows do not. They also show why aerial surveys and claims that bilbies are absent need careful checks on the ground.
2018PDF available
“Listen Carefully to the Voices of the Birds”: A Comparative Review of Birds as Signs
Why do owls, crows and cuckoos tell people things all over the world? Reviewing nearly 600 bird signs from 123 cultures, the authors found that half are carried by bird calls and a quarter by behaviour, and that the most “talkative” birds are common-enough but not too common. They argue that careful listening to birds extends our awareness far beyond what we can see.
2017PDF available
Bed site selection by a subordinate predator: an example with the cougar (Puma concolor) in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem
Where does a cougar sleep when wolves and bears share its home? By following GPS collars to 599 cougar beds in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, certified trackers found that cougars pick sunny, south-facing slopes in winter but favour steep, hidden spots near forest edges, the kind of places that make escape easier. Even a top predator, it seems, beds down like prey.
2017PDF available
Caching for where and what: evidence for a mnemonic strategy in a scatter-hoarder
Do squirrels sort their nuts? On the Berkeley campus, researchers handed wild fox squirrels 16 nuts of four kinds (almonds, hazelnuts, pecans and walnuts) in different orders and mapped every cache by GPS. When the squirrels collected from one spot, they kept each kind of nut in its own area, the first sign of this memory trick in a scatter hoarder, but when food came from many places they simply avoided where they had already cached.
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.