Sign and the Art of Tracking: A Guide to Support Law Enforcement Tracking and Anti-Poaching Operations

1. What they did

This is a training guide, not a research study. It was written for law enforcement officers, special forces, search and rescue teams and national park rangers, to help them track poachers, criminals and lost people, gather intelligence, and secure evidence for prosecution without destroying it. It is a photo guide to go with Jack Kearney’s book Tracking: A Blueprint for Learning How, and is meant to be used alongside courses with a professional instructor. Lead author Christian Nellemann worked with Jack Kearney (U.S. Border Patrol, retired) and Stig Nårstad (Norwegian Police), with the INTERPOL Environmental Crime Programme and other contributing authors.

The guide has 15 chapters:

• A tracking course. A sample three to seven day course for rangers, from a track pit to night tracking and scenarios such as poached elephants or a missing tourist couple.
• Search theory. How time elapsed and the subject’s speed set the search area, with tables of travel speeds and lost person distances.
• Tracking training. Starting easy in a track pit, the importance of sun angle, and walking beside the sign line.
• The tracking stick and sole patterns. Measuring stride and sole length, drawing and photographing prints, and counting people.
• Tracking procedures, with and without dogs, and lost track techniques.
• Crime scenes and contamination, including what poacher camps can reveal.
• Securing forensic evidence.
• Track traps and sign, in a long photo section.
• Aging of sign.
• Patrolling: long-distance tracking of vehicles and routes.
• Making patrols more effective.
• Reducing weight, water and food on long-range patrols.
• Counter tracking.
• Natural navigation.
• Survival.

2. What they found

As a guide, it gives advice rather than findings. Its main points:

Searching

• Time and speed define the search area. A fugitive moving at 2.5 km per hour for 4 hours could be anywhere within 314 km². If a tracker finds the general direction, the search shrinks to about one eighth of that, “the work of 350 men done in an instant”.
• People rarely move at random. Criminals move to avoid being caught, so their routes can often be predicted.

Seeing and following sign

• Look at sign with the light coming towards you; with the sun at your back you see next to nothing.
• Always walk beside the sign line, never on it, and mark confirmed sign so you can return to it.
• Measure stride and sole length, record how you measured, and draw and photograph prints. In one case, heel wear seen in 5-day-old prints matched a suspect, who was later convicted.
• Count people where they spread out, rest or camp, rather than by counting prints in a stride.
• Track traps (sand, mud, stream banks, dusty roads, slopes, crossings) are where people must leave sign. Rangers can also make them by raking roads.
• The photo section shows many kinds of sign: grabs, nesting, flattening, pointers, risers, shine, disturbance, transfer, colour change, crushed insects, sign in frost and water, and “mud clouds” in streams.

Aging sign

• There is no set rule. Never judge age from one sign alone; compare the whole sign line, and put your own fresh print beside it.
• Weather, wind, sun, ground and plant type all change how fast sign ages. Thin-skinned riverside plants dry out much faster than drought-resistant ones. Dew or rain on the underside of bent plants helps show whether someone passed before or after it fell.

Crime scenes

• The greatest problem is not weathering but destruction of sign, mostly by staff, vehicles, tourists and the tracker. Park at least 100 m away, use one entry and exit, and secure an area of at least 100 m radius.
• Poacher camps can show how many people there were, whether they were armed or trained, and where they came from, through fire types, food, toilet sites and transport.
• Evidence should be packed in paper, not plastic (plastic is better for DNA samples but makes clothing sweat), and handled by different officers.

Patrolling and counter tracking

• Divide an area into dead zones, tactical corridors and safe zones, and concentrate ground patrols in rugged safe zones.
• Patrols should be as light as poachers. The guide’s rule of thumb is that each kilogram of total weight costs about 10 seconds per km.
• About 35 counter tracking tricks are described, each with a remedy. Most cost the fugitive time and have little effect on a trained tracker team. A combined dog and tracker team is described as the hardest to evade.

3. What they concluded

• Tracking is not a gift of a few “supernatural” indigenous trackers. It is a practical skill anyone can learn with training, time and interest, and it takes substantial time on the ground (“dirt time”) to learn to see sign.
• Tracking is cheap, multiplies the efficiency of staff, and is not replaced by technology such as drones, satellites or sensors.
• Trackers’ accurate predictions of a fugitive’s choices come from following their exact route and understanding their mindset, not from any supernatural instinct.
• The aim of anti-poaching tracking is to catch poachers alive or follow them home and uncover the wider network. Killing a poacher reveals nothing and only escalates conflict.

4. How tracking was or was not used

The whole guide is about tracking people: step-by-step trailing, sign cutting and perimeter cutting to find a sign line, lost track procedures, aging sign, counting people, reading sole patterns, and interpreting crime scenes and camps. Animals appear only as crime scene victims, as signals of human presence (vultures, baboons), and as tracking dogs.

6. Other technologies, skills or innovations

• Combined dog (K9) and tracker teams.
• Raking roads and riverbeds with a towed rake or log to create track traps.
• Improvised crime scene marking (sticky notes, toothpicks, stripped twigs) and forensic sampling for DNA and soil.
• Natural navigation by sun, plants, wind and “home-centre” navigation, and survival skills for long patrols.
• Advanced evasion techniques are deliberately left out, for fear they would reach the wrong audience.

7. Implications for conservation (from the paper)

• Trained trackers are accurate, fast and light, and can let a park with few staff, little equipment and long borders patrol far more efficiently.
• The chance of being caught and sentenced is crucial in preventing poaching, and tracking is crucial to that in bush areas.
• Crime scenes must be protected so that evidence can support prosecution.