The Revival of Traditional Animal Tracking: A Sensory and Spiritual Homecoming

1. What they did

In this Master of Arts thesis in environmental education, Douglas Gaulke sets out a model for learning traditional animal tracking as a whole-body, whole-mind practice. He uses the words “traditional” and “wholistic” for the way he believes hunter-gatherer trackers worked, and calls modern trackers who focus on one task (population counts, radio collar tracking, fugitive recovery, nature centre identification) “specialists”.

The thesis draws on four kinds of evidence: scientific writing (on vision, hearing, the brain and child development), historical and ethnographic accounts of trackers, conversations with tracking teachers, and the author’s own tracking journals from about two years of intense tracking. It moves from the physical side of tracking to the spiritual, in six chapters:

• Nature’s Language: language as more than words, with examples from Cherokee.
• The Left Brain: Friend or Foe?: the place of logic, measurement and maths in tracking.
• The Art of Seeing: how the eye works and how trackers can train their vision.
• Rhythms of the Landscape: listening, pattern recognition and a five-step practice routine.
• Sensory Reawakening: touch, smell, taste, imitation and trailing.
• The Mirror of Nature: visualization, envisioning and “becoming” the animal.

2. What they found

Language and the brain

• The author argues that tracking began as a way of reading nature’s many “languages” (sound, smell, touch, body language), and that written language and modern culture have cut most people off from them.
• Logic, measurement and maths are useful tools, but he argues they work best when balanced with right brain skills such as drawing, empathy, imagination and non-verbal awareness.
• He describes traditional measuring tools: a tracking stick marked with stride length and track size, a blade of grass measured against fingers, and counting the tracks between two lines about 21 inches apart (the walking stride of a deer) and dividing by four to estimate the number of deer.
• He points out that tracking authors use different words for the same measurement (Tom Brown Jr.’s “trail width” and James Halfpenny’s “straddle”), so readers need to check each author’s definitions.

Seeing and listening

• He describes four kinds of vision, from passive “tunnel” vision to active, relaxed peripheral vision, and recommends wide-angle vision, a slow pace and drawing what you see.
• Search images can mislead: the mind may fill a gap with a wrong or cartoon image.
• Tracks can be seen as disturbances to a natural “baseline”, and animals send “concentric rings” of disturbance through the forest (from Tom Brown Jr.).
• A five-step routine for pattern recognition: (1) choose an undisturbed outdoor spot to return to daily; (2) visit it for at least six hours a week, in many short visits; (3) still the mind for 20 to 60 minutes; (4) sit with peripheral vision, 360 degree hearing and attention to the body, later moving slowly; (5) add natural history reading, without letting books replace experience.

Touch, smell, taste and the body

• Touching the floor and walls of a track, and comparing it with a fresh mark made beside it, helps with track aging. In Arizona, the author guessed some rock-hard coyote tracks were 36 hours old, and later learned it had not rained for two weeks.
• Smell and taste can also help age tracks and scat, as in quoted accounts of Australian Aboriginal and Akoa trackers. The author does not recommend tasting tracks in the eastern United States because of parasites and disease.
• Imitating an animal’s gait (and checking the pressure releases against the real tracks), its mood and its calls helps interpretation and builds empathy.
• Trailing over long distances reveals an animal’s personality, destination and mood.

Envisioning

• The author describes using meditation and envisioning while tracking. He tells of trailing three wolves in central Wisconsin with envisioning and “becoming”, and of envisioning the last minutes of a wounded white-tailed doe while reconstructing her trail in the snow. These are his personal experiences; no test of them is reported.

3. What they concluded

• Traditional animal tracking is close to extinction, held back by language, technology, diet, profession, culture and fear of the unfamiliar.
• The author believes the thesis fills a gap, because most tracking literature is about research and scientific uses, and writing on whole-person tracking is scarce.
• The thesis is offered as a loose guideline, “training wheels” for developing one’s own style, not a strict format. Reading cannot replace learning on the trail.
• Tracking could bring meaning, empathy, creativity and respect back into people’s lives, and could help children feel at home in nature.

4. How tracking was or was not used

Tracking is the subject of the thesis. The author draws on his own tracks and signs identification and trailing (red fox, raccoon, skunk, coyote, wolves and white-tailed deer, often in snow), including track measurement, gait interpretation, track aging, plaster casts and following a blood trail. These are told as personal stories from his journals, not as a structured study.

5. Tracker or observer certification

Reported but not validated. The author says he had been tracking for less than two years and names his teachers (Charles Worsham, Tom Brown Jr., Tom Hanratty, Jim Lowery and Jon Young) as “great trackers”. No certification or test of his or their tracking skill is reported. The thesis also states that mastery does not come “with a certificate from a weekend tracking class”.

6. Other technologies, skills or innovations

• A computer form for track measurements, with the back used for travel patterns, pressure releases, feelings and track aging.
• Showing pitch (the angle a track turns in or out) with a centre line drawn heel to toe through each track, instead of measuring the angle.
• Plaster casts and diagrams of wolf tracks.
• Recordings of animal calls on tape and CD; the author also kept small animals in an aquarium for about a week to learn their calls before releasing them where he found them.