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.
1997Publisher link
Sprawling locomotion in the lizard Sceloporus clarkii: the effects of speed on gait, hindlimb kinematics, and axial bending during walking
How does a sprawling lizard speed up? Filming lizards on a treadmill at three walking speeds, researchers found they kept the same trotting gait, the same leg angles and the same wave of body bending, and went faster mainly by pulling the thigh back more quickly. Their strides grew from 80 to 143 mm while their legs stayed just as sprawled.
1997Publisher link
The Complete Tracker: The Tracks, Signs, and Habits of North American Wildlife
Is tracking magic? Len McDougall says no: it is patience and knowing your animals. His 1997 guide teaches how to read tracks in mud, snow, grass and even on rock, age scat with the back of your hand, and get close enough to watch about 30 North American mammals, from moose to muskrats.
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.
1996PDF available
Age and Gender Classification of Merriam’s Turkeys from Foot Measurements
Can a turkey’s footprint tell you whether it is a hen or a gobbler, young or old? Measuring the feet of over 200 Merriam’s turkeys, researchers sexed birds correctly up to 98% of the time from foot length alone, and also told young from adult birds well with one measurement. Age proved much harder in a test population from Colorado, and the authors call for testing the method on real tracks.
1996PDF available
Calibration of tunnel tracking rates to estimate relative abundance of ship rats (Rattus rattus) and mice (Mus musculus) in a New Zealand forest
Can footprints in a baited tunnel tell you how many rats are in a forest? In a New Zealand forest, researchers trapped out the ship rats over five nights while counting tunnels with rat footprints, and the share of tracked tunnels fell in step with rat numbers. But as the rats disappeared, mice left more footprints, a reminder that one species can change what another’s tracks tell us.
1996Publisher link
Ecology and Behavior of Ground Beetles (Coleoptera: Carabidae)
Ground beetles steer by the sun and by silhouettes on the horizon, and some find their homes by the smell of algae or, probably, smoke. When attacked they may play dead, bite or spray chemicals. This review of a family of more than 40,000 species shows that these mostly night-active hunters probably eat more plants and carrion than once thought, often go hungry in the wild, and help keep crop pests in check.
1996Publisher link
Estimating Carnivore Densities for Conservation Purposes: Indirect Methods Compared to Baseline Demographic Data
How many cheetahs live in a park, and how would you know without years of fieldwork? Researchers compared four quick ways of estimating cheetah numbers in Kenya and Tanzania against counts of individually known animals. Simply asking park staff, scientists, tourists and farmers about their sightings came out most accurate, reaching 75 to 100% of the true numbers.
1996Publisher link
Evaluation of Three Relative Abundance Indices for Assessing Dingo Populations
How do you tell whether there are fewer dingoes after a control programme? In south-western Queensland, researchers compared three track-based indexes: scent-lured stations, buried-meat stations, and simply counting tracks across a raked strip of road. Counting tracks proved the most sensitive, while the lures revealed wary, food-learning dingoes, and the indexes did not always fall as expected after baiting.
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.
1996PDF available
Monitoring Martes Populations in California: Survey Design and Power Analysis
How many baited track plates does it take to notice that a rare forest carnivore is disappearing? Using computer simulations, two California researchers worked out that a statewide survey able to catch a 20% decline in fishers would need about 1150 sampling units, each made of eight track-plate stations. Their design also corrects for animals that were present but left no tracks.
1996Publisher link
Power of Track Surveys to Detect Changes in Cougar Populations
How many track transects does it take to know whether cougar numbers are falling? Using foot surveys of dry washes in Arizona and computer simulations, this study found that around 50 transects could catch a halving of numbers, but small yearly changes would need hundreds. Declines turned out to be easier to detect than increases.
1996Publisher link
Raven roosts are mobile information centres
How do young wandering ravens find a fresh carcass in a vast snowy forest? In Maine, researchers released hungry, uninformed ravens into night roosts and every one followed their roost-mates to new food at dawn. The roosts themselves moved to follow the food, and spectacular group soaring flights seemed to announce each move.
1996Publisher link
Sign Surveys for Estimating Trend of a Remnant Brown Bear Ursus arctos Population in Northern Spain
Can you count a rare bear population’s trend from their tracks and scats? Over three years in Spain’s Cantabrian Mountains, observers walked about 1,500 km of routes a year and found sign on only 4% of segments. The authors show why that was too little to detect a decline, and how more frequent surveys could help.
1996PDF available
Thermal Characteristics of Mountain Lion Dens
How does a mountain lion mother keep her newborn kittens cool through a hot Great Basin summer? In eastern California, researchers found three dens hidden in willow and wild rose thickets so dense they had to crawl in. On the hottest days the den floor was on average 14 to 22°C cooler than the air outside.
1995Publisher link
A Track Count for Estimating Mountain Lion Felis concolor californica Population Trend
Can you follow the fortunes of a whole state’s mountain lions by counting their tracks on dusty back roads? In California, a single surveyor on a motorcycle counted lion track sets across randomly chosen survey areas, and found it cheap and practical. The tracks also showed that lions favour roads along streams and mountain slopes, not the ridge tops where many surveyors looked for them.
1995PDF available
American Marten, Fisher, Lynx, and Wolverine: Survey Methods for Their Detection
How do you prove a wolverine, lynx, fisher or marten lives in a forest when you almost never see one? This classic 1995 Forest Service manual compares cameras, sooted track plates and snow tracking, and sets out how to read gaits, measure prints, and cast tracks in snow. It also warns that reading the manual is no substitute for practice in the field.
1995Publisher link
Bed-site selection by European roe deer (Capreolus capreolus) in southern Norway during winter
Where does a roe deer choose to lie down on a cold winter night? By following tracks through fresh snow in southern Norway, researchers found 294 beds and learned that the deer either rest close to where they feed in the open or walk farther to shelter under dense conifers, travelling farther when it is colder and when they rest longer. They also favoured small hilltops and lay just a few metres apart in groups, likely to keep watch for predators.
1995PDF available
Distinguishing Tracks of Marten and Fisher at Track-Plate Stations
Male martens and female fishers leave tracks of almost the same size, which makes these two rare forest carnivores hard to tell apart at track stations. By measuring hundreds of prints from known animals, researchers found that a few measurements of the palm pad sorted every test track to the right species, while popular clues like joined palm pads or a missing thumb print often misled.
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.
1995PDF available
OA Guide to Animal Tracking
Where do you look for animals, and how do you find the next track when the trail goes cold? This 1995 guide from Princeton University’s Outdoor Action Program walks beginners from reading the landscape down to dew marks on grass, track measurements, gaits and track aging. It ends with a simple exercise for learning to age tracks and a reminder that good trackers do not disturb the animals they follow.
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.