June 2025 News, Stories, and Events from Original Wisdom
A few years back, we welcomed two Sri Lankan students to our Nature Guide Training course in South Africa. Sixty days in our humble bushcamp forged not just new guides, but lifelong friends—and serious tracking enthusiasts. Since then, as those same students, Pasindu and Sameera, moved on to guide at the newly built Hilton Yala Resort on the edge of Sri Lanka’s Yala National Park, we often talked about reuniting. This year, it finally happened.
May 2025 News, Stories, and Events from Original Wisdom
Our New Natural History Museum at the Kruger Tracker Campus – Original Wisdom’s home in Africa! We finally have a dedicated space to keep our stuff at The Kruger Tracker Campus! After years of collecting and transporting skulls, sticks, nuts, seeds, stones, stone tools, fossils, antlers, horns, nests, feathers, feet, scats, and other fascinating finds from the forests, fields, and bush, we now have a proper home for it all. (photo – A plaster-of-Paris cast of the tracks of a loping Cape clawless otter by Kersey Lawrence)
April 2025 News, Stories, and Events from Original Wisdom
Our new book is out! TRACKING ANIMALS – A GUIDE TO TRAILING WILDLIFE, by Lee Gutteridge and Kersey Lawrence and published by Jacana Media. Filled with stories from Lee and Kersey, and other CyberTracker Evaluators. Available in print and as an eBook, and ordering info is inside. Also, look in the ONLINE EVENTS section of the Jan 2025 newsletter for links to a monthly article we write for the Hoedspruit Explorer, for some instruction and stories from the book to help whet your tracking appetite.
March 2025 News, Stories, and Events from Original Wisdom
We found the Montana mountain lion’s tracks on a fresh skiff of newly fallen snow, crossing the road and ducking under a barbed wire fence along a trail that the deer regularly used. Her tracks were crisp, and our guide asked us if we’d like to abandon our original plan to look for a variety of tracks and signs, or would we like to follow her…
What would you do? To find out what our answer was, read on in the Snow Tracking section below…
January 2025 News, Stories, and Events from Original Wisdom
Four researchers and trainers working across continents, all with a passion for trackers and tracking.
Kersey is from the USA, Jiska is from the Netherlands, and both of them currently live in South Africa. Along with Matt Nelson (USA) and Sandy Reed (USA), the Soul of Tracking team are collaborating in a long-term international Tracking Research project through the University of Cape Town, South Africa.
Read more about it here.
December 2024 Year in Review from Original Wisdom
Team Original Wisdom, Kersey Lawrence, Lee Gutteridge, Sandy and Cal Reed, Shane Hawkins, Hillary Lisowski, Samantha Snodgrass, Ozzy Banda, would all like to wish you happy holidays and a healthy and prosperous new year. As we close another year, we want to take a moment to thank all of you who have supported and joined us in our mission. Here’s to all the joys of the holiday season and to a New Year filled with hope, progress, and lots of Tracking!
Song and music by John Edmund, Story in the Sand.