The best way to describe trailing an animal is to tell a story. Trailing may be the original form of storytelling, stemming from a time where we sat around a fire and reenacted the hunt that provided our people with better food, clothing, shelter, and quality of life.
The following is a little story I wrote while practicing for the CyberTracker Trailing Specialist Evaluation on Pacific Northwest Bears – May 2016, Washington State, USA. It describes what it is like to trail an animal, to put together all of the pieces of tracking and become the animal we follow, in order to find it and yet try not to disturb it. I trail animals all over the world, wherever I go, but nothing had prepared me for “Rainforest”, or “Spirit” Bears that ghost over the wet mosses, leaving no trace of their passage unless they twist their feet or flag some vegetation.
This kind of intense preparation, after years of practice, got me through, and I achieved my Trailing Specialist and became the first woman Senior Tracker in the world.
That just means I’ve achieved a standard; there is so much more to learn!
- Kersey Lawrence
I’m following the bear through the redwoods. It’s a big male, and he places his feet carefully inside the footsteps of bears that have walked this path before him, including his own, older footprints. He twists his feet gently as he steps in these depressions, shifting his massive bulk to add depth and scent to where his feet land. You are right behind me. We walk slowly together, silently, like hunters but without weapons; we are alert and responsive to the land and to each other’s hand signals – we are becoming bears. There is no breeze. The air is heavy and humid. The bear is going up, ascending a redwood-forested mountain.
He walks on bear paths. It seems like bears have their own trails that no one else uses, and bears go wherever they want, whenever they want – hungry little tanks. The trail is easy to see where he shifts his feet, which he does a lot, but it fades to smudges and scuffs that are fluffy in texture when compared to the older tracks that compress the forest debris and leave it hard packed. I feel for this fluffiness when I am in doubt, confirming that we still follow.
We are approaching a jumble of huge redwoods. Some have fallen over, creating enormous road-blocks 20 feet high and hundreds of feet long. At lesser jumbles, we have crawled under fallen logs to continue his trail – we do a lot of crawling to follow the bear. Where will this bear go here? You grin at me and wait to see what I will do. It’s a juncture, and there are several possible routes. I see a difference in color going through a very small tunnel in the root ball of a large redwood, with a 10-foot drop on the downward side of it. It looks too small for a 300-350 pound bear to go through. I check other possible routes and there is nothing else – that’s our bear. I doubt that even I can get through that opening, so I sit and look at it but there is nothing else to do.
Coming from a background of trailing in Africa, I worry about dangerous animals and venomous snakes and spiders as I inch forward like a worm on my belly through the earthen opening, but there is supposed to be nothing here that can hurt me. I can smell the bear in his tracks: a sweet, musky smell. The tunnel isn’t long, and I reach through it to grab branches, rocks, and handfuls of earth on the other side to help pull myself out. On the other side I am still unable to stand, the salmon berry and jumbled branches arch over my head. An older bear trail turns my eyes right in front of me, crossing our trajectory and moving down the hillside. I ignore it and carry on. Some older trails confuse me because bear trails seem to persist forever in this area, but this one does not puzzle me. The ground is very hard here. The brightness and texture of our trail is difficult to see, but we do see it – it keeps ascending. It goes up and up, alternating between the deeper trails where he grinds his feet, and the softer suggestion of his normal walk.
He marks on trees: rubbing against them where we see his footfalls change, going close and grinding his black and cinnamon fur into the bark. Other trees he bites and claws at, leaving visual as well as olfactory sign behind for other bears – it’s approaching the peak of mating season here in the Pacific Northwest, and this big guy is the dominant male of the area.
Some trees, young redwoods and Douglas firs, he bites at the base and pulls the bark away in strips to feed on the spring, sap-filled cambium underneath. My heart hurts as I see this sign – it is the question that cost me 100% in the last track and sign evaluation. I am only beginning to understand bears, and Pacific Northwest bears are renowned for feeding on cambium – I’d never seen it before, even fresh, and the question I was asked had been very old, and resulted in another 99.9% for me, a failing score in a Track & Sign Specialist evaluation. In one tree, we see the cambium feeding, but there are also smaller incisor marks. We wonder who else fed on the inner bark, and hypothesize a Douglas or a flying squirrel – most likely a Douglas.
We find huge piles of bear scat composed of grasses, one near a big bed filled with bear hair. We use a stick to examine the scat. You explain how the color fades as the scat ages depending on whether it’s in the sun or shade, the moisture in the air, and how the insect composition changes as they grow and feed in the dung. I take careful mental notes.
The bear crests the mountain onto an old logging road where grasses grow. I follow the flagged grasses, looking well ahead. In some places it’s obvious, and in others it is very subtle. His trail shifts every once in a while to the sides of the road. I begin to see a pattern of salmonberry thickets where he goes to sit underneath and delicately plucks the juicy berries from the thorny vines with his lips, leaving the little stems still attached to the vines. He eats as he moves from thicket to thicket, and I sometimes find half-chewed berries marking his trail like little salmon-colored lights.
He turns and heads down the mountain. We untangle his route and follow. The landscape opens up a bit and the ground is covered in false-lily-of-the valley. You show me where bears have walked previously, comparing it to the fresher bruising and flagging of our bear – it takes me a few minutes but then I see it and am able to regain my momentum. I am not familiar with using so much vegetation in my trailing. The bear’s trail still heads in the major trajectory that he began on, only winding a little as he stops to feed, or eats as he walks. His mission isn’t distracted by feeding, it’s part of his mission. We continually drop down and crawl through salmonberry thickets after him.
In the thickets, little birds become agitated with our passage, scolding us and flying up out of our reach. The trail goes from obvious to disappearing, and I use my tracking stick (a beaver chew I picked up) to move aside the thorny vegetation. I see his trail go right in and over a jumble of logs and down a steep hill inside the thicket. I whisper, under my breath, “You’ve got to be kidding me!” And I dive in after him, sliding on my butt in my wool pants down the hill. I use my tracking stick to help push my way through a small bear-shaped tunnel in the thorns.
At the bottom, we land and carry on, alternating between walking and crawling to follow. You show me how ferns turn and flag his trail with their bright green underside – and I soak this all in. I learn quickly. It has been a slow few days getting going because bears are so different from anything I have ever trailed before, but I am picking it up, fast.
We look at a dig in the ground where he has excavated a bumblebee nest. The bees still buzz around the soil, looking for their home and you warn me not to get too close – the bees are confused and angry.
It takes me a while to untangle the trail in this area. We go up and down the mountain in short forays – looking down into a swamp area where he approached a stream. Did he cross, or did he go slightly up again and take a different route? All the trails look possible and he could have been milling around in the area. There is nothing to do but choose the best route and follow it to see if it continues or dead-ends. Eventually we are in the little swampy area, following flagging left by the bear stepping on and eating skunk cabbage. He is milling around in here, too, and the trail is still hard. You ask me what I will do. I say, “There is nothing to do except look for his trail out.”
I find a likely route, and it leads us deeper into a swampy area. We are following skunk cabbage flagging and bite marks. A beaver has been here and created channels that we wade through: thigh high on me and knee-deep for you. The trails twist and turn upon themselves in the swamp as he feeds. He enters an area with very tall ferns and skunk cabbage, bushes and trees. It’s not as deep here but it’s muddy and sucks at our feet and we still need to crawl in places through the ooze. The bear jumps up on fallen logs in places and walks down them like it’s a highway, feet gently depressing the moss before jumping off into the skunk cabbage again.
The plant growth is so thick here that he is creating tunnels everywhere under the vegetation and while the trail is obvious it is also super difficult to follow and constantly pushing the edges of my comfort zone. I am repeatedly saying to myself, “Shit, do I really have to go there?” before I dive in. Each day my hesitation to crawl where the bear is taking me subsides.
I have thorn scratches all over, and am usually soaked and muddy. My knees are sore from crawling, and my legs like jelly at the end of each day from the mountains we have gone up and down. Even climbing a steep and eroding bluff off of a beach where a female bear had gone up. I untangle her trail from those of the Roosevelt elk crossing the bluffs with her. You’d think that discriminating a bear trail from an elk trail would be easy, but it’s not, in long grasses where you can’t actually see the ground and all you see are pushed down grasses of similar width.
In one area, the ground is so hard that we follow her path by observing “where could she have gone that you wouldn’t see her trail?” instead of seeing her trail. In other words, we knew where she had to have gone because her trail was nowhere else, and we would have seen it in those other places. We knew she had gone up the bluff, and had checked all the obvious places, so she had to have walked where we could not see her footprints. Sure enough, confirmation of her passing through came where the ground became softer again, and the grasses long. Every moment I felt like I could fall in the steep shale and my knees felt weak. I lost my balance a lot, falling into stinging-nettles (another food item for bears), grabbing them with my bare hands to keep from sliding over the bluff.
But now, it’s fun. My mind has shifted from the physical and mental discomforts of trailing a new and very different species to enjoying and expecting the little novelties and mysteries in bear trails. I know I still have a lot to learn about bears but I have already learned so much in this short, mentored immersion experience. Now I know how to learn about bears – so I do, rapidly. It still amazes me where they can and do go. This is nothing like trailing in the deciduous forests of the northeast USA or the savannahs and bushveld areas of Southern Africa – but I expect the unexpected now – and I am enjoying the surprises that trailing bears gives me, and my growing intuition about their behaviors. I’m learning to think like a bear.
