Animal Tracks: reference books for novice trackers

Part one of a series of talks on animal tracks and tracking.

• Importance of tracking as a way to explore and experience the woods
• Mentions of influential mentors, particularly Tom Brown Jr.
• Discussion on various tracking books and resources
• Emphasis on the observation of tracks over mere identification

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Part one of a series of talks on animal tracks and tracking.

• Importance of tracking as a way to explore and experience the woods
• Mentions of influential mentors, particularly Tom Brown Jr.
• Discussion on various tracking books and resources
• Emphasis on the observation of tracks over mere identification

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. 

Welcome to the Rivery Nature Podcast. I'm Chad Clifford, your host, and today is part one of Animal Tracks and Sign, where we will lay the foundation to get your tracking skills up to speed. I've been teaching these skills for decades, practicing them even longer, thousands of photographs taken, hundreds of hours of dirt time.

You know, tracking is a fantastic way to explore and experience the woods. I've traded tracking posters, tracking rulers. I'm excited to share this with you.

Let's get going. In the Rivery Nature Podcast, you can expect to find a wide variety of topics on the nature experience, bushcraft, survival skills, nature lore, animal tracks and sign, storytelling, nature soundscapes, and much more. These are the lessons and skills I've been teaching for decades.

So before we dig in, please take a moment to subscribe and consider offering your support to the podcast. You know, when I bump into other tracking students or folks who appreciate animal tracks, especially the ones who take it a little more seriously and are, you know, digging into it as a hobby, I always find it interesting who, who their mentors were, where did they get their information from? Because they have, you know, we have very different approaches based on, you know, that angle. For instance, I come from the lineage of Tom Brown Jr. And I think, at least to me, he is the guy for animal tracks and signs.

So if you haven't checked out Tom Brown Jr's books, check those out. He has a series of animal tracking books, including tracking stories. He's tracked everything you can imagine.

And yeah, extremely good lecturer as well, Tom. I haven't checked out his stuff in the last decade or two, but yeah, very influenced by him. He got me onto this stuff.

I've taken a few courses from him back in the early nineties, I guess it was. Yeah. And that, that lit the fire for me.

I was full on tracking then for a long time, taking, as I said earlier, thousands of photographs, really, really enjoy it. And you know, you can contrast this with all the other different mentors or resources out there on animal tracks and sign. And they all have their own approach and their own ways of teaching or showing you how to decipher the world of animal tracks and sign, and it's all great.

In fact, I'll get into talking about briefly my library of books and, you know, talk about some of the standards and what each book maybe offers. And they all do offer something different. I don't have one tracking book and I have a few that doesn't offer something new and something that the others do not have.

So if you really get into animal tracks and sign, yeah, you're going to be collecting a few books. With that, there is a new book out too, that I will be talking about that I'm pretty excited to share with you. After teaching animal tracks and signs of many different groups and individuals, you know, all the lessons that I learned from other people and the stuff I've taught, it all kind of blends together.

And I'm having a hard time sometimes remembering what I learned from where and how I adapted it and how I've changed it to my own. My own teachings, but I like to start with this, and I'm pretty sure this comes from Tom Brown Jr. You know, if you were to take a moment and stand up, close your eyes and concentrate on your feet muscles, the muscles in your feet and how they respond to different movements. So if you're standing there with your eyes closed, or you just imagine that you're doing that, if you don't want to, raise out your front arm.

Notice how the muscles in your feet respond to that. Twist your body. Notice how your feet move to support that.

Do something like turn your head. Can you tell how your feet are moving to respond to that head movement? All these things show up in animal tracks, all these minute movements, and you need to be on your game to see these things in the tracks, but it can be done. I've spent, you know, quite a few hours.

I have made a sandbox for animal tracks and to learn how to see these different movements within the tracks. And I don't pretend to be great at it. I have gotten to the point where I can read things in a sandbox, in other words, perfect or ideal conditions.

A lot of these things are when you're seeing it in real life tracks in less than perfect conditions. Yeah, you do pick up some clues and signs from your hours in the sandbox, but you're getting to the head movements and harder terrains. Yeah, you know, it's certainly more challenging and, but that's taking it to the next level, isn't it? More broadly though, if we take each animal track, an individual track, consider that like a letter.

And that a collection of tracks is like a sentence. And when you take that sentence and you follow it for a ways and you take in other or other sign and consider the habitat you're in, you know, now you have a paragraph or even a chapter of a book and you start to see how things are fitting together and understanding and even predicting the movements of animals and what they might be up to. So if you consider the landscape, like an open manuscript, a big story being told and the animals are part of that.

And, you know, especially in the winter time, obviously, where you can see the tracks and you don't have to be a great tracker to follow tracks in the winter time, but you can start to put together the larger picture. And isn't this really role playing? You know, you're getting into the needs of the animal. What is it thinking? Is it a predator, you know, or is it looking for prey? Does it need water? Does it need shelter? You know, if you start literally role playing, getting into that animal's head, so to speak, what is it, what are its needs and how is it responding to its environment? Is it like a deer that tends to have repetitive, you know, behaviors day after day? Or is it like a fox that might have similar trails and territories that repeatedly goes over, but, you know, constantly on the lookout, following those smells for food.

When I do tracking lectures, I have this one slide where it shows this, I don't know if it was a Doberman pincher or some kind of a dog dressed up in a squirrel suit. The title of the, at the bottom says, to catch the squirrel, he must become the squirrel. Ordinarily, I'd wait till the end of an hour long introductory tracking workshop to talk about my reference books and what books, you know, I would suggest for you to pick up in order of importance in my own opinion.

But I think I'm going to actually start with that in the podcast format here, just to get you an idea of what kind of stuff's out there and what you should be looking for to dig into tracking. In following podcasts, we'll dig into my approach to teaching animal tracks and sign and how I suggest people learn and decipher what they're looking at. So before digging in here, I want to just mention that when I typically teach or share animal tracks and sign as an educational approach, I go with a one or two hour slideshow presentation for larger groups that are just sort of casually interested.

When I get students who are more interested, it's typically a three day course and it's intensive. We're not talking like three days of six hours. We're talking three, 12 hour days where into the evening there's slideshows, you know, one night could be a slideshow, like a two hour slideshow on nothing but weasels, the weasel family, their habits and behaviours and the individual characteristics of each species.

And, you know, there's so much to get into in so many details. So yeah, what I hope to do here with this series of podcasts is touch on more like the three days, some of the details I get into over three days. And obviously I won't have the photographs to show to you, but I will try and give descriptions and we'll just see how it goes.

Now you might think when you're learning animal tracks and sign that the goal is to identify the track down to specie level. No, that's the last thing you need. In fact, if you never learn what made the track, so what? I keep a tracking journal and there are tracks that I have not sorted out down to the specie level or figured out what made that sign literally for 15 years.

It was a mystery for 15 years. And then I come across something in a reading somewhere that tells me another clue about a particular animal and mystery solved. For example, I once came across, this was one of my prize finds.

I just love this thing. I came across this interesting thing in the wintertime. This was up near Thunder Bay.

It was on the side of Mount McKay, which is kind of a taller, I guess you could call it a mountain or a small mountain, halfway up anyway. And on the east side, and it was in the wintertime and there was a lot of snow that year, maybe three and a half feet of snow. And there's snow showing along and a couple of feet out of the snow.

There was what looked like a bird nest, like I said, maybe two feet above the snow. And upon closer inspection, this bird nest had a roof on it. So it was clearly a bird's nest with, but the roof was made out of different materials.

The roof was made out of muddy leaves, like leaves that were obviously taken from the ground and not really thatched into a roof, but just layered on top to make a roof. And I had no idea what made that because it was clearly, the construction methods were clearly changed when it came to the roof. And how often do you see a bird's nest with a roof on it, right? And this is Northern Ontario, in case you're not sure where Sibley is or Mount McKay.

Anyway, years later, I can't remember which book it was, but it was just a casual mention in one of my tracking books about how a mouse will sometimes take a bird's nest, renovate it by throwing a roof on there and use it as a cash or a place to store seeds and nuts. It is not clear if they actually spend much time in there beyond just going to get seeds and nuts. So mystery solved.

And there are many other instances where I've solved tracking mysteries years later. And that's why it's important to take notes, especially when you come across something that you can't quite sort out or figure out. Take photographs.

In those photographs, you need to have maybe a coin or something to give you the scale of the track or sign you're looking at, because later it'll be pretty hard to figure that out. And take notes, take measurements, all these things are required. And if you don't do that, yeah, good luck sorting it out later.

Anyway, lots of examples to talk about as we move ahead. The point being though, is don't worry about what made the track. One reason you don't need to worry about it is as soon as people know the name of something, or if you tell someone, oh, that's a whatever, a long tail weasel track.

It's typically the response is, oh, okay. And then they move on. This, that's all there is to learn, right? You know what the species is.

What else is there? No, that's, that's the wrong way to approach it. You, even if you do know what it is and you've followed these weasel tracks before, no, keep, go follow it. You don't have to follow it necessarily in the direction it's going.

If you go actually down the cold trail or backwards, that's even better. Cause you, you know, you don't want to necessarily be catching up to the animal and chasing it around the woods unknowingly. But find out what it's doing.

You're going to learn so much and find, come across so many interesting finds by searching out its behaviors, what it was looking for, what it's up to. That is the fun of tracking, not just coming to something, identifying it and move on. Same thing with plants, same thing with birds, right? It's the, uh, it's the observation that counts, not the identification.

So with that in mind, if you were going to be buying your first book or two on animal tracks and tracking, I would suggest getting one of the old standards. Um, for instance, the Peterson's Guide to Animal Tracks by Ollis Murray, or the Stokes Guide, Guide to Animal Tracking and Behavior. These books have lots of good illustrations.

They have a good description of the animal. It's, it's fairly generic, but they offer a good overview and they talk about each group of species, like the dog family, your foxes and your oties and wolves, uh, for instance, in the Stokes Guide, they'll talk about the habitat, the home range, the type of food, uh, mating times of the year, gestation periods, numbers of young, all those little details, you know, a little scientific here and stuff you may or may not be interested in, but it offers a great background because when you come across animal tracks and you're trying to, yeah, you do want to find out what made it, but it's as the reason I think you want to get it down to an identification is only to find out, learn more about those tracks and understand them more and about the behavior of that animal. But it's, it's the observations that count and the Stokes Guide and, and the Peterson Guides, they'll give you some of that background information to help you know what to look for and to help you understand what these animals could be up to and you know, their life habits and life cycles.

Stepping away from the old classics like the Stokes and Peterson's Guides, we have more modern things like Mammals of Canada by Lone Pine, Field Trackers, or I'm sorry, the Trackers Field Guide, a comprehensive manual for animal tracking. Now these books are fairly generic too, but they're starting, these newer books have photographs, they have illustrations and photographs and that's a great leap because illustrations, although they tend to show better detail, it's sort of out of context, isn't it? Like seeing the actual photograph and what those details look like in a real track in non-perfect conditions like sand, mud, snow, you know, and the erosion that takes place or the aging of the tracks. These, the newer generation of the Stokes and Peterson's Guides, like, like I said, the Falcon Guide or the Lone Pine Guide, they do take it to that next level while still giving you a good background on the animals themselves to help you learn about their habitat.

Well, not just habitat, but, you know, the habits of the animals and their life cycles and whatnot. And as far as animal tracks and sign go, you can expect to find the various gate patterns these animals use. And of course, when you have four legs and you change your speed, the track pattern changes with it.

These books are great for that. They show what the individual tracks are. They give you measurements of the tracks.

They give you the overall size of the, of the trailwebs, I think in most cases, and yeah, the patterns. So all these things will help you understand what species or group of species you might be looking at. And lots of good background to help you learn about the observations you've made and what observations that others have made that you might want to look out for, or you might, uh, clue into more easily than otherwise.

Now, another book, uh, which doesn't have much to do with tracking, uh, as, as in deciphering tracks is The Mammals of the Great Lakes region. So if you're anywhere near the Great Lakes region, yeah, this is a great book, Mammals of the Great Lakes region by Alan Kurta, and this book, I don't even think it shows a track in there, but what it does, it's a great, uh, great resource book for the mammals of that region. And it gives you all the background you'll probably need or want.

I believe in that book, if I'm not mistaken, yes, it has the, uh, the dental formula and the skull formulas at the back. So when you come across signs like old skulls or a jawbone, and you're trying to figure out what that animal was, you can go to this book and key it out in the back. And along that line, there's another book called Animal Skulls.

A Guide to North American Species by Mark Elbrook, and that also is pretty good, lots of good, uh, photographs and diagrams helping you to key out those skulls should you be interested in digging into that level. Another book that I like, I don't use it all that much though, is Bird Tracks and Sign, and you might not think of birds when you go tracking, but there are plenty of bird tracks when you get out there and, uh, more about that later. But anyway, Mark Elbrook and Eleanor Marks have a book called Bird Tracks and Sign, which is probably worth your while at some point, if you're going to spend much time in the outdoors tracking.

So up until this point, I've talked about fairly generic books that give you background on the various species you'll encounter in their habits and whatnot, and some track identification and sign characteristics. But if you're more serious about tracking, there are books that, uh, use the space in the book, not to necessarily cover those details so much. These are the tracking books.

It's focused on the tracking and sign, not so much the life cycle of the animals and gestation periods and all that kind of stuff. So that's what these other books were for. So, uh, one book that is really good, it's called Tracking and the Art of Seeing by Paul Racinda is How to Read Animal Tracks and Sign.

So Tracking and the Art of Seeing. And when it came out, I was really impressed with that. It, uh, has great photographs.

I think the best thing about this book is the photographs. It was one of the first books to have great photographs and a fair bit of insight too, and for animal tracks and sign, there's even photographs in some cases for some species of the animals' feet. So they must have had stuffed animals or trapped animals at some point, they got ahold of to take pictures of what their feet actually do look like, as opposed to using illustrations.

So that's a pretty good book. Uh, uh, of course, these books that I'm getting into now, this, the ones that are really focused on animals, uh, tracks, and tracking, these are the books I'd recommend getting first before these, those other, uh, those other books, the old standards. Another pretty good book, another book by Mark Elbroek along with, uh, Leon Labenberg and, uh, Lao is a book called Practical Tracking, a Guide to Following Footprints and Finding Animals.

Fairly generic book, uh, it doesn't go into the kind of details on tracks and tracking that I'd normally be looking for, but it does have some pretty good sign and, and some pretty good photographs with some good tips in there. Another less known book probably to you would be A Field Guide to Mammal Tracking in North America by Halfpenny and Beisiaat, if I'm pronouncing that right. And it's, I don't see this book around very much, so it's fairly obscure, but it's pretty good.

They got a lot of good gate patterns or typical gate patterns for animal tracks and signs. So there, there's some good stuff in there. All these books have tidbits scattered throughout them that are unique to that book.

I don't have any one book that has all of the information. There's, there's so many tidbits spread out through all these books. That's why I'm covering them all, not just talking about the book.

However, if there was the book, for me, it would be Tom Brown's Field Guide to Nature Observation and Tracking with the author being Tom Brown Jr. And his book goes into a lot of stories and nature observation. He's, it's really about senses and really melting into your environment and how you really see and observe more. So he gets into stuff that will help you become a better tracker, ways to walk, ways to look, ways to listen.

It's really quite interesting and entertaining. And it's, it's a wonderful book far beyond just plain old tracking or the details of animals, life cycle and whatnot. So I would start with that one.

It goes into details like how to age a track, how to train yourself to look more closely or, or at a glance from tracks by doing different journaling ideas and how to age tracks by doing certain techniques. So if you want to be a good tracker, I would certainly point you towards the Tom Brown's Field Guide to Nature Observation and Tracking. And if you like that, he does have other books on tracking, some that get extremely technical for track in the tracking world anyway.

And that may or may not interest you, but the book I did reference is a great starting point. Now there's a new book that I have the privilege of reviewing. It's called Sticky Tracks.

Learn how to identify 14 animals from their tracks, poop, and other signs in just one hour. And because I'm doing a review of this book, anyway, I will share some of those thoughts with you here. And the first thought that jumps into my head is, wow, one hour.

So this is going to be a, you know, a pretty organized and, and clear and concise book. So I started with that approach and, you know, I'm used to picking up tracking books and being fairly unimpressed. Like there's always tidbits here and there.

There's a few books that I am very impressed with and others I have them because they're all worth having, but yeah, you kind of have to poke through it a bit to get the nuggets out of there. You know, this book by Sticky Tracks, Lawrence Holt Books Incorporated is the publisher, I guess, I started into it and I said, okay, one hour. And the book's fairly thick.

I don't know how many pages we have here. Let's see, 240 ish pages. You know, it's a substantial book.

It's like half size. And I like the cover. The cover itself is pretty interesting.

It has a silhouette of a wolf upside down with its tracks and above the wolf, there's a person with a lens or a, you know, not a microscope, but a loop looking closely at the tracks and the silhouette of that person's body shape is the wolf shadow. Very cool. And it reminds me of Sherlock Holmes, right? Out there with your magnifying glass, looking for clues, collecting evidence, not making any decisions or calls right away, just collecting evidence, making the observations and eventually coming up with an idea of what made those tracks.

So anyway, pretty cool cover. I did read it and it did take about an hour to read. I took my time and read it thoroughly.

And I must say this is a good book and I will certainly be recommending this to folks when I do give out references for books. It's broken up into two sections called sequence one and sequence two, with sequence one being about animal tracks and sequence two being about the sign or the habitat. This book does a really good job for an introduction into tracking.

It does what it says it does. Give yourself an hour without having to take notes. It just gives you the information and really orients you to the world of tracking.

It talks about the sort of things that I almost have a tendency to overlook when I'm explaining tracks to folks who are new at it. You know, things like there's four toes that tend to show up in a track from the dog family. People don't know this kind of stuff or they're not thinking about that kind of stuff.

And, you know, with the weasels, there's not four toes. So they keep it simple. They keep it for the beginner.

And there's lots of great tips in here that, you know, people who have spent lots of time tracking will benefit from as well. It's very disorienting looking at a track when you first look at it. And this book does a great job with great photographs and illustrations pointing the features out with these for these 14 species that it's trying to orient you to.

So good job on that. What I was particularly happy about with this book was the fact that I learned things with a lot of tracking books. There's always a nugget or two, but this one besides being well laid out and a great book to get started with if you're new to tracking, it had new tidbits for me too of a guy who has tons of these books, similar books with photographs and illustrations.

But no, this had stuff that was new as well. For instance, comparing dog tracks to wolf tracks or coyote tracks, I think it is just a little trick to look at the angle of the outer toes sticking out more for dogs. I don't recall any other book offering that information or even the shape of the heel pads for comparing the animal or comparing the dog family to the cat family.

Different ways of looking at the same tracks, they're using techniques that aren't so much in other books. So good on them. This looks pretty good.

When it comes to the different families of animals you come across, you know, in terms of tracking like the cat family, you know, there's characteristics about the cats and their body shape and the way they walk, their behaviours, same with the dog family. Right? So the book does a good job of briefly pointing these things out meant to get you on your way in an hour. This is a great book to get started.

I love it. Clearly, there was a lot of thought into how this book was laid out. I'm assuming done by people who have trained others before and know the common mistakes that people make and know how disorienting it is for someone who's never paid attention to tracks to decipher what you're actually looking at.

So I have to say, mission accomplished. If you give yourself one hour, as the book says it will do, you will orient yourself to the world of track and have a good start on getting going. So for those of you who do have other tracking books, yeah, grab this one too.

Yeah, it's worth having. It's a good book. So that about does it for this episode.

It's already pushing 30 minutes here. So next time, I think I will dig into how I approach teaching animal tracks and tracking and sign. And maybe we'll start with the tools that I offer students and the materials that I use to get them going, including stuff I've developed myself.

Thank you for joining us on the Reverie Nature podcast. Remember to subscribe for more captivating episodes exploring the wonders of the natural world. Until next time, may you saunter forth embracing nature song and may the whispers of the wilderness lingers in your heart.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.