Basic Visual Tracking: Elective, Cadet / Instructor Notes

1. What they did

This is a training manual, not a research paper. The Australian Air Training Corps wrote these notes for cadets and instructors running a Basic Visual Tracking elective. The course is for cadets who have completed Advanced Stage, is not assessed, and runs over 21 periods including a bivouac (an overnight camp). It builds on the survival skills cadets have already learnt, and can also be used in FC and SV training (the manual does not spell out these abbreviations), where tracks of animals and people may help with rescue or warn of dangerous animals nearby.

The course has 12 lessons:

• Introduction to the principles of tracking.
• Types of sign.
• Techniques for detecting sign: where and how to look.
• Practical: building three “time boxes” filled with soft soil or sand, to watch how tracks change with time.
• Animal tracks, eating habits and animal habits.
• Practical: making plaster moulds of at least three different animal tracks.
• Information gained from tracks and signs.
• Practical: reading a scenario laid out in soft earth by staff.
• Practical: pairs of cadets lay a trail of up to 300 metres for the others to follow, rotating until everyone has tracked someone.
• Deceptive measures used to hide tracks.
• Revision: following trails laid with deceptive measures.
• Conclusion: the need for continued personal practice.

The notes are mainly about tracking people, often in a combat setting where a scout leads a section into hostile territory, but say there is not much difference between tracking people and animals.

2. What they found

As a manual, it sets out teaching points rather than findings. The main ones:

Types of sign

• Permanent sign: lasting, human-made marks such as cut or broken vegetation, dropped objects and rearranged vegetation.
• Temporary sign: unavoidable marks of movement on soil, vegetation and insect and animal life, which return to normal after rain and time.
• Top sign (about knee height and above): “big” after a large party breaks through vegetation, “small” when a party moves carefully.
• Ground sign (below knee height): “large” when a party leaves a clear path, “small” when a light party places their feet carefully.

Where and how to look

• Scan the ground 3 to 4 metres ahead, moving head and eyes from side to side; look low, using sunlight and shadow, and look through the undergrowth rather than at it.
• People take the easy route, so search the edges of clearings and forests, banks of rivers and waterholes, muddy patches and soft ground.
• Useful signs include touch-sensitive plants and fungi (back to normal within two hours), mud carried onto rocks and logs, broken cobwebs (most spiders build webs at night), bark turned over (dry side up or a dry patch below), crushed dead wood, moved branches, and bent grass.

Ageing tracks and signs

The notes stress that ageing tracks is very hard without much practice, and tracks over three days old are “usually for information only”. Cues include pockmarks from light rain, nocturnal animal tracks on top of a print, mud refilling with water over several hours, blood darkening from red to brownish red (3 to 4 hours) to blackish brown (5 to 6 hours), broken plants darkening over about four hours, moist earth on rocks drying in about two hours, dew on turned-over leaves, and insects still scattering from a moved branch.

Reading the trail

• Direction from the scoop of earth at the toe, grass pushed forward, snagged vines and silt settling in prints in still water.
• Number in a party: count all prints in a one-metre section and divide by two.
• Speed from pace length (about 65 to 75 cm when walking) and lighter heels when running.
• Confident parties take regular paces with few stops; cautious ones take shorter paces, pivot and change direction.
• Load, weapons, morale, food eaten (from rubbish and faeces) and male or female from foot size, width and toe angle.

Deceptive measures

Walking backwards, retracing steps, walking in streams, taking to the trees, rock hopping, dragging a bush, wearing rags or vegetation on the feet, and stepping in each other’s prints. For each, the notes describe what gives it away; most remove some information but not the fact that someone passed.

Animals

Short panels with photos and track drawings describe deer, possums, fox, dingo or dog, cat and feral pig, including scat shape and where scats are found. Animals are grouped as carnivores, herbivores, omnivores and insectivores. Most animals need water regularly and are most alert when drinking, feeding and at burrow and den entrances; many feed in the early morning while there is dew, and feral pigs rest by day and forage at night, returning nightly to carcasses.

3. What they concluded

The manual ends by asking cadets to understand the need for continued personal practice, and to explain how a visual tracker can use their skills in FC and SV training. It also reminds them that animal habits are never a certainty: what an animal did six days in a row may not be what they do on the seventh.

4. How tracking was or was not used

The whole manual is about tracking: identifying tracks and signs of people and animals, ageing them, reading information from them, following a trail laid by other cadets, and seeing through deceptive measures. Practice includes time boxes, set scenarios in soft earth, trails of up to 300 metres, and plaster casts of animal tracks.

6. Other technologies, skills or innovations

• Plaster of Paris casting, with a coloured first pour into the print and a white second pour in an egg ring or cardboard ring, so the finished cast is a coloured print on a white base. Debris is cleared from the print with a straw; casts are lifted with the surrounding soil and left to dry.
• Reprosil, a dental impression material, as a faster-drying but more expensive alternative.
• Time boxes (at least one metre square, filled with no more than 12 mm of soft soil or sand) for practising track ageing.