OA Guide to Animal Tracking

1. What they did

Rick Curtis, Director of Princeton University’s Outdoor Action Program, wrote this 13-page guide to teach beginners how to find and read animal tracks and signs. It opens with quotations from John Stokes and Tom Brown and a reminder that learning to track is “a sacred responsibility”: trackers should not disturb animals.

The guide works from the large scale to the small:

• Sign tracking. Reading the landscape, travel routes, sleeping areas and feeding areas, then medium, small and “ghost” scale sign.
• Tracks. The parts of a track, how to measure one, and how to classify tracks by clear print or by pattern.
• Reading and aging tracks. Sidedness, sex, and how weather, gravity and soil wear tracks down.
• Learning techniques. Study cards, a tracking stick, a field kit, and field hazards.

It ends with a short bibliography of tracking field guides.

2. What they found

This is a guide, not a study, so it reports teaching points rather than findings. The main ones:

Sign tracking

• About half of tracking is sign tracking and half is working with tracks.
• Animals gather on habitat “islands” with good cover and a wide variety of plants. Transition areas, where two habitats meet (forest and field, field and stream), are described as excellent places to find animals; deep forest and open fields as poor. Voles, rabbits and deer are named as indicators of good habitat.
• Animals use trails (shared by many species and rarely changed), runs (used by one kind of animal, and more changeable) and escape routes. They sleep in beds, transit beds, lays and dens, and feed in several patterns, such as eating through a patch of plants.
• Medium scale sign includes rubs, hair and feathers, gnaws and chews (a clean 45-degree cut from a rodent, a ragged edge from deer), scratchings, disturbed ground debris, broken vegetation and scat.
• Scat shape points to the animal family (tubular for the dog family and others, tapered for cats, small round pellets for rabbits and hares). Taking scat apart shows what a carnivore has been eating, and herbivore scat changes with the seasons. Raptors leave pellets of bone, hair and feathers.
• Small and “ghost” sign includes compressions in dust and grit, dull marks in morning dew, shiny pressed grass (said to fade in about 2 hours), and leaf depressions. Many of these are easiest to see by “sideheading”: keeping the track between you and the light, with your head down near the ground.

Tracks

• The guide stresses the “true track” rather than the overall outline, which softer soil enlarges. It says only the true track separates, for example, a dog from a coyote.
• Track measurements are length, width, stride, straddle and pitch, with a worked example for pitch. Comparing the left and right strides shows a person’s dominant side, and the guide links this to lost people walking in circles.
• About 5% of tracks are clear prints; the other 95% are read by pattern.
• Animals are grouped by their usual pattern: diagonal walkers (deer, dog and cat families), bound walkers (the weasel family except skunks and badgers), gallop walkers (rabbits, hares and most rodents) and pacers (badgers, skunks, porcupines, opossums, raccoons and bears). Each group changes pattern with speed, and the guide says gait can also show an animal’s “emotional state”, for example pacing when aggravated.
• In deer and cats, the guide says whether the rear track falls inside or outside the front track shows sex in adults (inside for males, outside for females).

Aging tracks

• Weather is described as the most important factor in how a track wears down, then gravity, then soil type (rated from 1 for sand to 10 for clay).
• In the “Wisdom of the Marks” exercise, the learner makes marks of different depths in prepared soil and watches them age over hours and days, in every season. The guide says this can teach a tracker to age tracks to within 2 hours.

3. What they concluded

• “All the information you need to find the next track is within the one you have.”
• Never skip a track. Working at a hard track, even for hours, is how a tracker’s skill grows.
• Tracking should be non-intrusive: getting too close can make animals abandon young, damage nesting and feeding areas, and in winter can cost stressed animals the energy they need to survive.

4. How tracking was or was not used

The whole guide is about tracking: reading the landscape, identifying tracks and signs (tracks, scat, hair, feeding signs, claw scratchings, beds, trails and runs), measuring tracks, reading gaits, aging tracks and scat, and finding the next track in a trail with a tracking stick. Some sections also cover human tracks.

6. Other technologies, skills or innovations

• Tracking stick: a straight stick about 3 feet long, notched or fitted with rubber bands or O-rings, set to a trail’s length, width, stride, straddle and pitch. Laid on the last track, it points to where the next one should be.
• File cards: 3 x 5 inch cards made from a field guide, scanned in spare moments to learn tracks.
• Track pack: magnifying glass and jeweller’s loupe, tape measure, ruler, notebook, zip-lock bags, field guides, tweezers, popsicle sticks and string, and price tags for labels.
• Wisdom of the Marks: a home-made aging exercise in prepared soil, repeated monthly and in new areas.
• Field safety: handling scat with gloves or a stick and not breathing in dry scat dust; poison ivy, oak and sumac; ticks (Rocky Mountain spotted fever and Lyme disease); bees and wasps; rattlesnakes; rabies; and hantavirus.

7. Implications for conservation (from the paper)

• Trackers come into the centre of animals’ lives and homes, and should respect them by staying non-intrusive. Disturbance can lead animals to abandon young, damage nesting and feeding grounds, and in winter can even cause an animal’s death.