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.
1998PDF available
Comparison of Proposed Survey Procedures for Detection of Forest Carnivores
Which works better for finding marten, fisher and wolverine: a camera or a sooted plate that records footprints? In Montana’s Bitterroot Mountains, cameras found more species and made identification easy, while track plates were faster and cheaper. But 87% of the field prints were too poor for a confident identification, and marten seemed wary of entering covered plates.
1998Publisher link
Fallow Deer and Wild Boar Pellet Group Disappearance in a Mediterranean Area
How long does dung stay on the ground? In an Italian coastal park, researchers set out fresh fallow deer and wild boar dung every season and watched it disappear. In winter almost all of it lasted a month, but in autumn dung beetles and rain removed 88% of the deer dung within a month, with beetles arriving at some pellets in under an hour.
1998Publisher link
How are people affecting the distribution of less migratory wildlife in the southern Kalahari of Botswana? A spatial analysis
Why are gemsbok missing from so much of Botswana’s southern Kalahari? By counting tracks and dung at 43 points and comparing them with ground and aerial counts, researchers found that cattle change the vegetation only within about 10 km of their boreholes, yet gemsbok stay rare out to 40 km and beyond. They conclude that hunting, not competition with livestock, is pushing gemsbok away.
1998Publisher link
Importance of Observer Experience in Finding Desert Tortoises
Does experience make you better at finding desert tortoises? In two field tests in California’s Mojave Desert, workshop participants searched plots seeded with lifelike model tortoises, real scat and artificial burrows. Novices did as well as experienced surveyors, some novices found every tortoise, and searchers at every level missed most of the scat and mistook rodent holes for tortoise burrows.
1998PDF available
Interpreting Carnivore Scent-Station Surveys
For decades, wildlife managers have counted carnivore tracks at scented patches of smoothed earth to follow population trends. Using eight years of Minnesota data, these authors showed that a single wolf, coyote or fox often leaves tracks at several stations in a row, and that earlier tests of the method were too weak to say whether it works. Their advice: count lines rather than stations, look for long-term trends, and use scent stations alongside other information.
1998PDF available
Interpreting Evidence of Depredation of Duck Nests in the Prairie Pothole Region
A raided duck nest is a crime scene, and each predator leaves its own signature. From red foxes that carry off and bury every egg, to badgers that dig, to raccoons that hold eggs upright and open them on the end, this classic field guide sets out how to read the eggshells, caches and trails left behind, and why careful recording beats guessing.
1998Publisher link
Methods, marks, and models for inferring hominid and carnivore behavior
Who got to the carcass first: early humans with stone tools, or big cats and hyenas? In this short, sharp reply, Salvatore Capaldo defends how he read the cut marks and tooth marks on bones from Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania, and shows that two different experiments produced matching results. He argues that careful, repeatable ways of counting marks matter as much as the marks themselves.
1998Publisher link
Sleep, Sleeping Sites, and Sleep-Related Activities: Awakening to Their Significance
Monkeys and apes spend about half their lives at their sleeping sites, yet most research has followed them only by day. This review shows how primates choose where to sleep to avoid leopards and hunters, stay warm and dry, and keep clear of parasites, and what goes on socially as they settle down for the night.
1998Publisher link
Spoor counts as indices of large carnivore populations: the relationship between spoor frequency, sampling effort and true density
Do more tracks on the road really mean more animals? In northern Namibia, Ju/Hoansi San trackers counted leopard, lion and wild dog spoor while the true number of animals was known from individual recognition. Spoor density rose in a straight line with true density, but lions and wild dogs, which travel farther each day, left more spoor per animal than leopards.
1998Publisher link
Summer Bed Sites of Elk (Cervus elaphus) in the Black Hills, South Dakota: Considerations for Thermal Cover Management
Where does an elk lie down on a hot summer day? By following radio-collared elk to 131 daytime beds in South Dakota’s Custer State Park, researchers found that the elk chose shady, tree-covered, north-facing spots on litter and bare ground, about 5 °C cooler than the open air. Keeping cool, not hiding from people, seemed to guide their choice.
1998Publisher link
The Psychology of Lost
Why do lost hunters so often walk the wrong way, convinced they are headed out? Drawing on psychological research, interviews with rescued lost people and Nova Scotia search reports, Kenneth Hill explains how people lose their bearings, the strategies they use to find them again, and how fear clouds their thinking. In over 800 cases, only two people deliberately stayed put.
1998Publisher link
The Revival of Traditional Animal Tracking: A Sensory and Spiritual Homecoming
Can you learn to track with your fingertips, your nose and your imagination? In this 1998 thesis, Douglas Gaulke argues that tracking is a whole-body art, and draws on Kalahari, Aboriginal and Native American trackers as well as his own trails of fox, wolves and deer. He sets out a simple daily routine to retrain the eyes and ears for tracks and signs.
1998Publisher link
The difficulty of estimating population densities of nocturnal forest mammals from transect counts of animals
Walking a forest trail at night with a headtorch, how many animals do you miss? This short paper explains why many nocturnal forest mammals go unseen even right beside the observer, and why that makes population densities from night transects unreliable. It sets out what survey reports should include instead.
1998Publisher link
The role of scent marking in a free-ranging, female black-footed cat (Felis nigripes)
By following one habituated black-footed cat through the night for 575 hours, researchers in South Africa’s Northern Cape counted 1454 urine-sprays. She hardly marked when pregnant and not at all while raising kittens, then averaged up to 36 sprays an hour a night in the weeks before mating, all across the areas she used most. Her scent marks seem to tell males when she is ready to breed, and her silence may help keep her kittens hidden.
1998Publisher link
Unsupervised recognition of individual tigers and snow leopards from their footprints
Can a computer tell which tiger left a footprint without being told who walked where? Using hind prints from captive tigers and snow leopards laid in sand, this early study found that a Bayesian program sorted prints into the right animals almost perfectly for tigers and well for snow leopards, while a neural network method failed. The author sets out what still has to be solved before it can be used on wild tracks.
1998Publisher link
Use of Track Stations to Index Abundance of Sciurids
Can a length of plastic rain gutter, some chalk and a dab of peanut butter count squirrels as well as weeks of trapping? In Arizona’s pine forests, researchers found that the number of track stations with Abert’s squirrel footprints matched mark-recapture population estimates almost perfectly. The stations were cheaper, lighter and quicker than live traps, killed no animals, and were better at detecting which species were present.
1997PDF available
Bed-Site Characteristics of Pronghorn Fawns
Where does a newborn pronghorn hide in the Texas desert? Following 101 radio-tagged fawns, researchers found they bed down on flat ground right against a tuft of grass, a shrub or a yucca, hidden while lying down but with a clear view of the land around them. As fawns grow, their choice of bed changes from hiding to watching for danger.
1997Publisher link
Effects of prey size, meal size, meal composition, and daily frequency of feeding on the recovery of rodent remains from carnivore scats
How many mice does a coyote scat really hold? In feeding trials with captive coyotes, the share of mouse teeth that came through ranged from 1% to 24%, depending on how much and what else the coyote ate, and how often. Hair passed through undigested, so the authors suggest using teeth and bones to identify rodents in scats, and hair to judge how much of each was eaten.
1997Publisher link
Facts from feces revisited
In the Brenta mountains of Italy, nobody had seen the last brown bears, yet their droppings told researchers how isolated they were, that both males and females survived, and what they had eaten. This 1997 review shows how DNA from scat can reveal species, individuals, sex, diet, disease and family ties, and why scat may be the best clue we have to rare and elusive mammals.
1997PDF available
Mesocarnivores of Northern California: Biology, Management, and Survey Techniques
How do you prove a rare wolverine or fisher lives in a forest? This 1997 California workshop manual brings together the biology of more than a dozen kinds of mesocarnivores with hands-on guides to snow tracking, sooted track plates and video cameras. It shows why “decisions about the presence of rare species will often rest solely on track evidence”, and how hard it is to count animals that are seldom seen.
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.