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.
October 2024 News, Stories, and Events from Original Wisdom
Some nipped twigs taken from inside the large dung balls of an endangered black rhinoceros. We are so lucky to see these on their infrequent trails and I keep them in my pocket as “awareness reminders” of these secretive and dangerous beings.
Photo credit: Kersey Lawrence
Featured Event from South Africa:
On the Trail of Elephants: A story with Finger Lakes Community College participants from our upcoming book.
By Kersey Lawrence & Lee Gutteridge
Featured Event in North America:
Go Wild! Nature Fair in Coyote Run Fairfield Park
By Sandy Reed
Featured Event in Human Culture:
Wild Clay Pots
by Cal Reed
February 2024 News, Stories and Events from Original Wisdom
An eastern coyote straddle trots across Alum Creek in Ohio. This months leading photo was taken by Original Wisdom staff Sandy Reed in one of the rare moments this year that snow accumulated in central Ohio.
It takes a village to medicate an elephant
To watch the 3 minute YouTube video that accompanies this story, scroll down to the link at the bottom. We pulled in to Dundee Dam with our students, FGASA Level 1 guide trainees from all over the world, to view a hippo cow and calf that were in thewater. Across the dam wall, we saw […]
Ghosts in the darkness
I awoke the other night in the wee hours before dawn. It was extremely bright due to our moon waxing towards full. My bare feet padded silently to the window on the cool cement floor. I looked out upon a large grey body. I had to soften my vision to see her clearly, so closely […]
“Ledyard native a top international wildlife tracker” – The Day Newspaper
While in the USA recently, I was interviewed by a reporter, Amanda Hutchinson, from The Day newspaper in Connecticut. Here is a link to the article that just came out today: Ledyard native a top international wildlife tracker
The beauty of trailing deer… and some observations on track ageing.
I was recently in New England on a brief stopover home to visit family, and had a singular opportunity to get into the woods on some deer trails with Nate Harvey, who is also a Senior Tracker and Evaluator for CyberTracker. Nate is one of my mentors, and runs a trailing school in southern Vermont, […]
Tracking with White Pine Programs
I was recently invited to spend another blissful weekend feeding my tracking addition with like-minded folks at White Pine Programs in southern Maine. As an alumnus of their first ever Tracking Apprenticeship in 2007-2008, and a former Teaching Assistant for the program, I’ve been invited back for a few years now to help teach the […]
Trailing, and an encounter with an elephant
Trailing, and an encounter with an elephant – UCONN Aug 2015 group We walked out of camp and into the South African sunrise. I stepped over the tracks of three big dugga boys (Cape buffalo bulls) who had recently headed in the direction that Lee had taken with the other students, and silently said a […]