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.
1960Publisher link
How Animals Run
How can a cheetah reach about 70 miles per hour when a horse with the same 23-foot stride manages 43? Filming a trained cheetah and race horses at 200 frames per second, Milton Hildebrand showed how long lower legs, swiveling shoulder blades, a whip-like spine and springy ligaments turn muscle into speed. A classic 1960 explanation of the mechanics behind every running animal’s stride.
1959PDF available
Distinctions between the Skulls of Coyotes and Dogs
Found a canine skull and wondering if it was a coyote or someone’s dog? In this short 1959 paper, Grover Krantz sets out 14 traits, from the shape of the nose opening to the cusps on the molars, that can separate the two even on broken specimens. His advice: look for at least two traits before you decide.
1959Publisher link
Motions of the Running Cheetah and Horse
How does a cat one-ninth the weight of a horse cover as much ground in a single stride? By tracing old film of a sprinting cheetah and a champion racehorse frame by frame, this 1959 paper showed that the cheetah flies through the air twice in each stride and bends its back like an inchworm, adding speed with every bound. It also sets out the two gallops, transverse and rotary, and the order in which each animal’s feet strike the ground.
1957PDF available
Fieldbook of Illinois Mammals
In 1957 the Illinois Natural History Survey gave hikers a pocket guide to the state’s 59 wild mammals, and a whole chapter on reading their tracks and signs. The authors call sign reading “detective work”: narrow the suspects by size, range, habitat and season, then look for a tail mark, a gnawed skull or a cut-grass bundle to settle it.
1950PDF available
Rectilinear Locomotion in a Snake (Boa occidentalis)
How does a heavy snake creep forward in a dead straight line? In a 1950 study, H. W. Lissmann filmed and X-rayed young boas and found that waves of muscle run backwards along the belly, so the belly moves in small steps while the backbone glides along steadily. The ribs do not “walk” at all: the snake moves much like an earthworm, a way of moving the author thought unique among vertebrates.
1946Publisher link
The Mechanism of Locomotion in Snakes
How does a snake move without legs? In this classic 1946 study, J. Gray put a common grass snake on pegboards, in glass tubes and on smooth metal plates. He showed that one snake can glide, move like a concertina, or side-wind, depending only on what the ground gives it to push against. His description of side-winding tracks, a row of parallel straight lines each as long as the snake, still helps anyone reading a snake’s trail.
1944Publisher link
Leaf Nests of Gray Squirrel in Connecticut
That ball of leaves high in a tree is a squirrel’s summer home, and in 1941 two researchers in Connecticut pulled down 146 of them to see how they are built. They found nests mostly in white pines, lined with moss, grass and shredded bark, woven from oak leaves carried in from other trees, and busy with fleas, caterpillars and leftover meals. They also describe how to tell a nest in use from an old one.
1939Publisher link
Sections Aid in Identifying Hair
Can a single hair in a carnivore’s dropping tell you what it ate? In this short 1939 note, Ned Dearborn shows that the guard hairs of shrews, mice, voles, bats, rabbits and other small mammals can often be identified by the shape of their cross section, and, when that fails, by the pattern of their central core. He suggests building a set of reference drawings and comparing unknown hairs against them under the microscope.
1936PDF available
Following Fox Trails
In the snowy winter of 1934, Adolph Murie followed a pair of red foxes across a Michigan reserve, reading every pounce, chase and hidden rabbit in their tracks. He found the foxes caught more than they could eat and cached the rest, and that crows, owls, hawks and skunks often ate it instead. A classic of reading animal stories in the snow.
1931Publisher link
Hibernation in Mammals
How does a ground squirrel survive months underground with a heartbeat as slow as five beats a minute? In this 1931 review, George Johnson combined over a century of research with his own experiments to explain what hibernation is, how animals enter and leave it, and why they wake every few days. It is a classic window into the hidden half of the year for burrowing mammals.
1928PDF available
Field Book of North American Mammals: Descriptions of Every Mammal Known North of the Rio Grande, Together with Brief Accounts of Habits, Geographical Ranges, etc.
In 1928, a curator at the American Museum of Natural History tried to fit every mammal north of the Rio Grande, all 1,445 species and subspecies, into one pocket field book. Alongside descriptions and range maps, it gives short notes on where each group lives, what they eat and how they raise young, and urges everyone outdoors to keep a journal of the mammal behaviour they see.
1927PDF available
Training in Tracking
Nearly a century ago, a Scout leader writing as “Gilcraft” set out how to turn boys into trackers, step by step, from memory games and stalking to reading human footprints, animal gaits and bird tracks in the snow. The book draws on Indian Khoji trackers, an Australian police tracker named Tiger and Baden-Powell’s own stories, and it ends with a frank warning: no book can make you a tracker, only practice can.
1926PDF available
Scouting on Two Continents
How do you follow a king’s wagons across country trampled by fifty thousand cattle in the rainy season, or find a horseshoe print in the dark with only your fingers? In his 1926 memoir, scout Frederick Russell Burnham recalls trailing, and being trailed, in the Apache wars of Arizona and the wars of southern Africa, and the tricks he used to hide his own tracks. A vivid, if very much of-its-time, record of tracking in practice more than a century ago.
1919PDF available
How Animals Talk, and Other Pleasant Studies of Birds and Beasts
How did a lame wolf find a deer his pack had killed eight miles away, in silence and against the wind? In 1919 the naturalist William J. Long followed wolves, caribou and foxes through the snow, read their stories from the tracks, and asked whether animals can warn and call each other without a sound. His book also explains how keeping still, the wind and scent decide how close a wild animal will come.
1909PDF available
Tracks and Tracking
In 1909 Josef Brunner set down twenty years of hunting and tracking experience in a fully illustrated guide to the tracks, trails and signs of North American mammals and birds. He argued that the trail tells far more than a single track, admitted which deer tracks he could not tell apart, and called the cougar “the most perfect tracker” for using a trail only as a guide.
1906PDF available
California Mammals
In 1906 Frank Stephens set out to describe every mammal known from California, all 276 of them, from gray whales to bats. Between the measurements and skull notes are field observations that still speak to trackers: pocket-rat tracks around his camp, the heel and tail marks of pocket mice in dusty roads, a burrow dug open to reveal six granaries of acorns, and cougar tracks from a cat he never once saw alive.
1881PDF available
Mountain Scouting: A Hand-Book for Officers and Soldiers on the Frontiers
In 1881, an army officer who had commanded Native American scouts in Idaho and Oregon set down what he had learned about reading trails. His handbook explains how to age tracks by rain, dew and drifting sand, tell a trotting pony from a galloping one by stride length, and spread sand to see which animals visited camp at night, alongside notes on the habits of elk, deer, bears and prairie dogs. It also tells how his scout Shaplish picked out one officer’s trail by the long, springy stride of youth.
1880PDF available
Nests and Eggs of American Birds
A robin’s nest on the ribs of a fossil skeleton, house wrens in an old hat, and a dipper’s mossy home behind a waterfall: Ernest Ingersoll’s 1879 to 1880 natural history gathers what early naturalists knew about how North American songbirds build, lay and raise their young. It is a window on 19th-century bird study and full of clues about how hidden nests were found.
Publisher link
Knotting for Scouts
“Very often it may happen that lives depend on a knot being properly tied,” wrote Baden-Powell. This pocket-sized Scout booklet shows how to whip a rope end and tie 28 knots and four lashings, from the reef knot and bowline to the fireman’s chair knot used in rescues. Not about tracking, but a handy reminder of the rope skills that go with time in the field.
Publisher link
SAR Field Search Methods: Search Techniques Used by Trained Teams in the Field
When someone goes missing in the wild, search teams do not just walk in lines across fields. This plain-spoken training article explains six land search methods, from quick checks of the obvious places to sand-filled “track traps” on trails that trackers rake smooth and then read for the lost person’s footprints.
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.