Early morning
sand casting
|
Ellis teaches tracking at Point Reyes National
Seashore, north of San Francisco. One summer Saturday I attended one of his classes. Tracking is often associated with hunting,
but the tracking Michael Ellis teaches encourages
sensitivity and respect for the environment, not exploitation
or avariciousness. After showing us his prize collection of
dried animal scats ("People even mail scats to me," he said.
A scat is a euphemism for feces, which is a euphemism for, well, you get the idea), he led the diverse group of men
and women on a sandy trail between a lagoon and the beach.
On the way, he told us that sand is one of the best mediums
for tracking, particularly in the morning when the angle of
the sunlight shows the edges of tracks and before people
walk through the area, erasing the documents of the night.
And, in more northerly latitudes or higher elevations, in
early winter, a light snowfall is often ideal for spotting
tracks of small and larger mammals on and off trail.
In a short while, he showed us a bobcat track, and
tracks of the critters it was hunting: tiny mice prints, the
almost human-looking hind paw print of a raccoon, and the
cleft hooves of a doe and her fawn.
Mud, too, is an excellent medium, having the advantage
of being in places where people don't usually walk, like
stream banks and the edges of ponds and lakes, and after a
rain, on the trail itself. Ellis lifted an old plank near
some tracks on the tidal mud, and, like a bunch of extras in
a Pompeii-inspired blockbuster, a score of panicky mice
scattered in all directions.
So once you've found good tracking terrain—about the
only terrain that isn't so good is sun-baked soil in the
middle of summer—you'll need to train your eye to see
prints and signs of animal life, and then use a guidebook
to identify what you're seeing. The classic is Murie's
above-mentioned book, which covers all of North America, but
there are others that are specific to particular regions.
At first, though, just scan and observe as you walk.
What's the lay of the land, its steepness, openness,
foliage, and water sources? All of these can affect the
habitat and behavior of animals. So you can begin to
predict where animals might den or seek water, food, or
prey. And now when you see a scat, rather than react with
aversion, you can use the observation to piece together the
patterns of critters usually unseen. As Michael Ellis put
it, "Tracking increases awareness."
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