In more urban areas, you may also find signs of wild or domesticated life, particularly near parks and other natural areas (or closer to home; raccoons, opossums, squirrels, and deer visit from time to time). But you can also play detective in relation to human signs, noticing things like tire tracks, litter, campfires, cigarette butts, shoe or footprints, and dog or horseshoe prints. One nationally known tracker, Tom Brown from New Jersey, author of The Tracker and The Search, helps law enforcement agencies find missing people and solve crimes using his extensive tracking knowledge.
Few of us will ever track a missing person, but you can figure out things that seem unusual, satisfying your curiosity and sometimes setting your mind at ease. For example, noticing the absence of overhead power lines in a particular neighborhood could help you realize it's part of the power company's campaign to put lines underground. Or, the overturned trash can in your yard might tell you that a raccoon was at play, not a dog. Why? There's no trash strewn about. A dog would make a total mess, but a raccoon takes its catch to a secretive place in the brush to search for bits of food. Tracking, whether in the city or woods, is a matter of fine-tuning your senses and making sense of it all.
With wildlife, the ultimate track, according to Ellis, Tom Brown, and the late Olaus Murie (he was president of the Wilderness Society and compiled a life list of almost 200 tracks of different species of mammals and birds) is a part of the animal itself, such as a carcass, skull, bone, or feather. Animals often retreat to a secluded spot when they sense they are dying, so bones are not commonly found, unless the death was catastrophic. I found a coyote skull once near a stream, perhaps indicating bad water. And recently I discovered the carcass and bones of a fawn who had jumped down the steep embankment of a dried creek bed and got tangled in an old wire fence. I found the fawn's remains, by the way, by observing a turkey vulture suddenly fly up in front of me, tipping me off that it was feeding on nearby prey.
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