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.
2007PDF available
Identification of pumas (Puma concolor (Linnaeus, 1771)) through faeces: a comparison between morphological and molecular methods
How sure can you be that a cat scat came from a puma? In Brazil’s cerrado, researchers checked 20 scats collected as puma scats using both DNA and the scale patterns of swallowed guard hairs, and found two were from ocelots. The two methods agreed every time both worked, and the authors suggest using them together.
2007PDF available
Interspecific Scaling of the Morphology and Posture of the Limbs during the Locomotion of Cats (Felidae)
Do big cats walk on straighter legs than small ones? Filming nine species from house cats to tigers, researchers found that cats from under 4 kg to nearly 200 kg walk with almost the same bent-legged posture. The leopard, a keen climber, was the most crouched of all.
2007PDF available
Investigating the feasibility of a passive tracking index for monitoring wildlife in the Lower Omo Valley, Ethiopia
Can a few strips of raked soil across a dirt road help manage wildlife where money and equipment are scarce? In Ethiopia’s Lower Omo Valley, a local tracker read the tracks on twenty plots for three days, giving activity indices for lesser kudu, dikdik, hyaenas, baboons and guineafowl, and turning up caracal and serval too. The authors suggest the method could guide sport hunting, conflict with people and recovery after anthrax outbreaks.
2007PDF available
Long-term automated monitoring of the distribution of small carnivores
Stoats are rare, wary and wide-ranging, so short surveys with footprint tracking tunnels can miss them. In New Zealand, researchers tested the Scentinel, a “smart” tracking tunnel that weighs and photographs every visitor, checking its identifications against footprints. It spotted a stoat more than two weeks before the tracking tunnels did, and showed rats were far more patchy than the footprint survey suggested.
2007Publisher link
Modeling Wolverine Occurrence Using Aerial Surveys of Tracks in Snow
How do you find a rare, wide-ranging carnivore across 60,000 km² of northern forest? Flying low in a small ski plane, an experienced team read wolverine trails in the snow, following gait changes over long stretches to tell them from fisher tracks. Combined with a statistical model that allows for missed tracks, their 26 days of flying produced an objective map of where wolverines live in northwestern Ontario, Canada.
2007PDF available
Morphometric identification of small mammal footprints from ink tracking tunnels in the Brazilian Cerrado
Many small rodents and marsupials leave almost identical tracks. In Brazil’s Cerrado, researchers built cheap ink tunnels from water pipe, collected 1408 prints from 30 known species, and showed that measuring the distances between toe and sole pads could tell even close relatives apart. The tunnels also recorded more animals than live traps, including shy species the traps missed.
2007Publisher link
Perspectives on over-marking: is it good to be on top?
When one animal leaves its scent right on top of another’s, what is it saying? This review sets out ten possible reasons for over-marking, from competition and territory to mate attraction, and shows that voles and hamsters pay most attention to whichever scent is on top.
2007Publisher link
Puma Field Guide
How do you tell a puma track from a big dog’s, or a puma kill from a dog kill? This field guide from The Cougar Network brings together decades of field experience on reading puma tracks and signs, from toe angles and heel pads to scrapes, buried kills and “puma paths”. It also covers counting tracks, telling individual pumas apart from their footprints, and responding when pumas and people meet.
2007Publisher link
Sources of Variation in Carnivore Tooth-Mark Frequencies in a Modern Spotted Hyena (Crocuta crocuta) Den Assemblage, Amboseli Park, Kenya
How do you tell, from a pile of old bones, whether hyenas or early humans ate first? Studying bones from a spotted hyena den in Kenya’s Amboseli National Park, this study shows that the share of tooth-marked bones depends on how big the pieces are, which bone they come from, and how dense that bone is. The author suggests ways to compare bone collections fairly, starting with the dense middle shafts of limb bones.
2007PDF available
The Effect of Snowmobile Trails on Coyote Movements Within Lynx Home Ranges
Do snowmobile trails open up deep-snow lynx country to coyotes? By following coyote trails for 322 km through the Montana snow, researchers found that coyotes stayed in lynx habitat all winter, but spent less than 8% of their travel on packed trails. They found firmer snow on their own, and mostly scavenged deer carcasses rather than hunting the hares lynx depend on.
2007PDF available
The Evolution of Endurance Running and the Tyranny of Ethnography: A Reply to Pickering and Bunn (2007)
Could early humans have run their prey to exhaustion without being able to track them? Answering critics, the authors argue that tracking is as old as hunting, and that early humans, without bows or tipped spears, would have needed to track wounded animals and run them down in the heat. They warn against judging the distant past only by how hunter-gatherers live today.
2007Publisher link
The endurance running hypothesis and hunting and scavenging in savanna-woodlands
Did early humans run their prey to exhaustion? Two researchers who spent decades watching Hadza and Kua San hunters argue that the wooded savannas where early Homo lived made tracking and running hunts very hard. Their account of a Kua San hunter walking down a duiker for three hours on its hoof prints shows just how much skill a persistence hunt demands.
2007Publisher link
The status of pine martens Martes martes (L.) in Northern Ireland, 1850-2004
Where have Northern Ireland’s pine martens gone? By piecing together 150 years of records and walking 57 forests in search of scats, researchers found that martens once shot on sporting estates now face a new danger on the roads, with Fermanagh and Tyrone still their strongholds. They also warn that fox scats are easily mistaken for marten scats.
2007Publisher link
Unusual findings on host-tick interactions through carnivore scat analysis
What can a fox or genet scat tell you about the ticks on a rabbit or a wood mouse? While studying predator diets in Portugal, researchers found 276 ticks among the food remains in 940 scats. By matching ticks to the prey eaten, they recorded host-tick links never before reported for Portugal, showing that scats can be a new window on the parasites of prey.
2007Publisher link
Unveiling the Limitations of Scat Surveys to Monitor Social Species: A Case Study on River Otters
Do more otters leave more droppings? By following river otter trails in the snow along rivers in New Brunswick, Canada, researchers found that the number of sites with droppings levels off once three or more otters share a stretch of river, because groups keep using the same latrines. Their findings cast doubt on using scat surveys to judge how many otters are present.
2007PDF available
Urban Search: Managing Missing Person Searches in the Urban Environment. Chapter 1: Introduction
Most searches for lost people that we hear about happen in the wilderness, but every day people go missing in towns and cities. This opening chapter of a handbook for search managers explains why urban searches need their own methods, how they differ from disaster “urban search and rescue”, and who is usually in charge.
2007PDF available
Use, misuse and extensions of “ideal gas” models of animal encounter
What if animals bumped into each other like molecules in a gas? Biologists have borrowed this physics idea again and again to predict how often animals should meet by chance. This review shows where those predictions hold, where earlier studies got the sums wrong, and why a mangabey group in Uganda may meet its neighbours far less often than chance alone would suggest.
2007PDF available
Using Multiple Survey Methods to Detect Terrestrial Reptiles and Mammals: What Are the Most Successful and Cost-Efficient Combinations?
Which survey methods give the most wildlife for the money? In Brisbane’s urban bushland, researchers compared six ways of finding reptiles and small mammals, from pitfall traps to hair funnels and scats. Every method found at least one species the others missed, but pitfall traps were best value for reptiles and hair funnels for mammals.
2007PDF available
Using Patterns in Track-Plate Footprints to Identify Individual Fishers
Can fishers be identified by their “fingerprints”? Researchers in New York showed that the tiny dots left by bumps on a fisher’s foot pad are unique to each animal, so prints on track plates can tell individuals apart. Along each trail, just one or two fishers made all the visits, which changes how track-plate surveys can be used to count animals.
2007Publisher link
Using Scent-Matching Dogs to Identify Individual Amur Tigers from Scats
Can a dog tell one tiger from another by the smell of their scat? In the Russian Far East, five trained dogs matched scats from 25 known Amur tigers 87% of the time, rising to 98% when each tiger was tested on different days. One tiger’s scats were matched even when deposited four years apart, offering a possible alternative to DNA for counting tigers.
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.