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.
2015Publisher link
Communal latrines act as potentially important communication centers in ocelots Leopardus pardalis
On a small island in the Panama Canal, ocelots keep in touch through shared latrines tucked under tree buttresses. Camera traps and DNA from scats showed that most latrines were used by several ocelots of both sexes, and one was visited by 17 different animals over six years. The latrines seem to work as message boards: the cats never met there, but each could have “read” the scent of up to 14 others.
2015Publisher link
Consumption of fleshy fruit: Are central European carnivores really less frugivorous than southern European carnivores?
Do foxes, badgers and martens in Central Europe really eat less fruit than their southern cousins? A botanist pooled decades of scat and stomach studies from Spain to Scandinavia and found that, season for season, fruit is just as much on the menu in the north. What matters most is what grows nearby, from wild cherries to orchard apples.
2015Publisher link
Cougar den site selection in the Southern Yellowstone Ecosystem
Where does a cougar mother hide her kittens? In Wyoming’s Southern Yellowstone, researchers following GPS-collared females found 25 dens, most of them deep in criss-crossed fallen logs, and most kittens were born in June or July. The mothers chose the den spot itself with great care, but their dens sat in less rugged ground than expected.
2015PDF available
Emerging Technologies to Conserve Biodiversity
Satellites, drones, DNA and smartphones are changing how we watch wildlife, but can they save species on their own? This review of conservation technology argues that the answer is no: the right tools must reach the right people. It highlights non-invasive methods such as reading footprints, and names indigenous expert trackers and CyberTracker as part of the future.
2015PDF available
Improvements on GPS Location Cluster Analysis for the Prediction of Large Carnivore Feeding Activities: Ground-Truth Detection Probability and Inclusion of Activity Sensor Measures
How good are field teams at finding a cougar’s meals? In Colorado, researchers combined GPS collars and simple activity sensors to predict cougar feeding sites with about 90% accuracy, and used a blind double-observer test to show that searchers missed only about 4% of feeding sites, mostly small prey. Correcting for those misses added about 10% more predicted feeding events, a sign that earlier kill rates may have been too low.
2015Publisher link
Nowhere to hide: pumas, black bears, and competition refuges
In Colorado and California, black bears found and took over many puma kills in summer, and pumas could find nowhere on the landscape to hide them. By reading tracks and signs at GPS-located kill sites and watching kills on video, researchers found that pumas made up for the stolen meat by killing more often, with kill rates up by nearly half in the bear season.
2015PDF available
Preference of antlion and wormlion larvae (Neuroptera: Myrmeleontidae; Diptera: Vermileonidae) for substrates according to substrate particle sizes
Why do antlion pits turn up in some patches of sand and not others? Sampling the homes of 13 antlion species and one wormlion across four continents, and then letting larvae choose between eight grades of sand, researchers found that each species has its own preferred grain size, from fine desert powder to coarse gravelly sand. Most chose medium sand, but one desert species chose the finest grains.
2015PDF available
Profiling and Tactical Tracking
How do the United States Marines teach new officers to read tracks? This student handout from The Basic School breaks a footprint into its parts, sets out the measures of human gait, and lists the signs a tracker looks for, from overturned stones to displaced dew. It pairs tracking with “combat profiling”, reading people’s behaviour against a baseline of what is normal.
2015PDF available
Recolonizing wolves influence the realized niche of resident cougars
When wolves returned to the Southern Yellowstone Ecosystem, the cougars already living there had to adjust. Following collared cougars to more than 650 kills over a decade, researchers found that cougars took more mule deer and fewer elk in summer, hunted more in forest, and lost kittens to wolves. The authors argue that wolves are reshaping the cougar’s place in the ecosystem.
2015PDF available
Tactical Tracking: Ancient Strategies for Modern Manhunts
Drones and thermal cameras do not always find a fugitive who flees into the woods. A former park ranger and lead tracker describes how visual tracking helped convict a ranger’s killer, why teams with hunters and ex-military members did better in the Eric Rudolph manhunt, and how “elimination tracking” found a suspect in a 20,000-acre park within 30 hours.
2015PDF available
The Comparative Effects of Large Carnivores on the Acquisition of Carrion by Scavengers
Who gets to eat when a puma makes a kill? Cameras on deer carcasses in a California forest showed that pumas keep foxes, bobcats and birds at bay, which lets skunks and ringtails feed more, while black bears take over carcasses, push almost everyone else out, and drive pumas away from most of their own kills.
2015Publisher link
The Living Dead: Time to Integrate Scavenging into Ecological Teaching
Every animal dies, and almost every meat eater will scavenge when it gets the chance, yet ecology textbooks barely mention carrion. Two Spanish ecologists show how scavenging shapes food webs, from whale carcasses on the deep-sea floor to a 2000 kg rhino eaten down to a few bones in three and a half days, and call for it to be taught.
2015PDF available
The Role of Scent Marking in Mate Selection by Female Pumas (Puma concolor)
A small pile of scraped-up soil can be a puma’s dating profile. Filming 30 community scrape sites in California’s Santa Cruz Mountains, researchers found that females visit in short bursts that seem to match their time in heat, and tend to choose the older, heavier males that visit and scrape the most, likely the dominant residents. Some females mated with more than one male, which may help protect their kittens.
2015PDF available
Use Tracking Skills to Protect Your Property
Could your driveway tell you who came to visit last night? A tracking instructor shows how homeowners can set “track traps”, rake them clean to age new prints, and keep a footprint log of family and friends, so an unfamiliar track stands out. The article also explains how a footprint can hint at a person’s height, gender, weight and intent.
2014PDF available
A moving–resting process with an embedded Brownian motion for animal movements
Animals do not move all the time, yet many models of GPS data assume they do. Jun Yan, Kersey Lawrence (published as Kirstin Lawrence-Apfel) and colleagues built a “moving–resting” model that lets animals stop, and tested it on a Wyoming mountain lion. She spent about ten times longer resting than moving, often staying for days near her kills.
2014PDF available
Animal Density and Track Counts: Understanding the Nature of Observations Based on Animal Movements
"But how do you avoid counting the same animal twice?" In the Kalahari, Keeping and Pelletier showed that, for estimating density from tracks with the Formozov–Malyshev–Pereleshin formula, you don't need to: every crossing counts. Using computer simulations, gemsbok and steenbok trails followed by trackers, and a field comparison with sightings, they found that the number of track crossings depends only on how many animals there are and how far they walk, not on how winding their paths are.
2014PDF available
Bush tracking and warfare in late twentieth-century east and southern Africa
In Africa’s wars of the 1950s to 1980s, finding the enemy often came down to reading footprints. Historian Tim Stapleton traces how game wardens, tracker teams, helicopters and mine-protected vehicles turned tracking into a weapon in Kenya, Rhodesia and Namibia, and how guerrillas fought back with stilts, swapped boot soles and watered-down tracks.
2014Publisher link
Consequences of the instar stage for behavior in a pit-building antlion
Two antlion larvae can weigh exactly the same and still behave like different animals. In this laboratory study from Israel, larvae in their final larval stage dug bigger pits, struck faster at prey and ate more of each meal than younger larvae of the same weight, until the younger ones moulted and caught up. The authors argue that size alone can hide important differences between individuals.
2014Publisher link
Contributions to the Understanding of Gait Control
Every walker leaves a signature. This Danish thesis summary starts with the 3.6-million-year-old Laetoli footprints and then shows, in the gait lab, that healthy people walk in measurably different ways that stay the same from day to day. High heels, a drop-foot or even a leaning posture shift the forces between ankle, knee and hip, and the swing of each leg is powered largely by elastic energy stored in the hip ligaments.
2014PDF available
Cracking mud, freezing dirt, and breaking rocks
Dried mud keeps a record of its own history. In this feature, two physicists explain why a later mud crack turns to meet an earlier one at a right angle, why mud that is wetted and dried again and again develops six-sided cracks, and how the same simple physics shapes frozen ground on Earth and Mars, the basalt columns of Fingal’s Cave and even the scales on a crocodile’s snout. Not about tracking, but a fresh way of looking at the mud we read every day.
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.