The Scouting Guide to Tracking: An Officially-Licensed Book of the Boy Scouts of America: Essential Skills for Identifying and Trailing Animals

By The Boy Scouts of America and Len McDougall

In Scouting’s Guide to Tracking, current Scouts, Scout alumni, and readers interested in the outdoors are provided with time-tested advice on how to track big and small animals over different types of terrain. Some practical tips include:
 

• How to determine the age of tracks in any circumstance
• How to recognize the distinctive marks of dozens of different species
• How to track in desert, forest, snow, and grassy areas
• How to identify instances when an animal has circled around or backtracked
• Stalking techniques such as cold hunting, camouflaging, and using the stump method
• How time and weather affect signs
• And so much more!
  
  Since 1910, the Boy Scouts of America has helped build the future leaders of this country by combining educational activities and lifelong values with fun. The BSA is committed to training youth in responsible citizenship, character development, and self-reliance through participation in a wide range of outdoor activities.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Skyhorse
• Release date: Jan 7, 2020
• ISBN: 9781510737761

The Boy Scouts of America

The Boy Scouts of America provides the nation’s foremost youth program of character development and values-based leadership training, which helps young people be “Prepared. For Life.®” The Scouting organization is composed of nearly 2.4 million youth members between the ages of 7 and 21 and approximately 960,000 volunteers in local councils throughout the United States and its territories. For more information on the Boy Scouts of America, please visit www.scouting.org.

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Text and Photos Copyright © 2019 by Len McDougall

Logo Copyright © 2019 The Boy Scouts of America

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018. Printed under license from the Boy Scouts of America to Skyhorse Publishing. For more information on the Boy Scouts of America program, visit www.scouting.org.

Skyhorse Publishing books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund—raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018 or [e-mail].

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Visit our website at www.skyhorsepublishing.com.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Cover design by Brian Petersen

Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-3773-0

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-3776-1

Printed in China.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

Using This Book

SECTION ONE: THE PRINCIPLES OF TRACKING AND READING SIGN

Chapter 1: Generics of Animal Tracks and Physiology

Generics of Animal Tracking

The Quadrupedal Design

Paw Anatomy

Hoof Anatomy

Weight Displacement

Digitigrade

Plantigrade

Track Patterns

How Quadrupeds Walk

How Quadrupeds Trot

How Quadrupeds Run

Terrain Variations

Mud

Snow

Sand

Forest humus

Casting Tracks

Functions of a Tail

Natural Tools and Weapons

Reading Tracks

Chapter 2: The Role of Scents

Territorial Scents

Mating Scents

Danger Scents

Camouflage Scents

Chapter 3: Analyzing Scats

Scat Location

Interpreting Diet from Scats

Interpreting Health from Scats

Aging Scats

Chapter 4: Reading Sign

Territorial Sign

Feeding Sign

Mating Sign

Bedding Sign

Chapter 5: Generic Animal Behaviors

How Animals Behave

Territorial Behaviors

Feeding Behaviors

Mating Behavior

Bedding Behaviors

Scents in Behavior

Body Language

Escape Behaviors

Chapter 6: Reading Sign

Feeding Sign

Mating Sign

Bedding Sign

Environmental Disturbances

Chapter 7: Scouting Techniques

Litmus Field

Trail Timers

String Timers

Electronic Timers

Cold Tracking

Cameras

Tracking Kit Equipment List

Chapter 8: Stalking Techniques

Slowing Down

Stalking

Camouflage

What Animals See

Stalking Under Observation

The Stump Method

Blowing in the Wind

Chapter 9: Trailing Injured Animals

Chapter 10: Tracking Humans

The Human Design

Being on Your Toes

Walking Indian

Aging Tracks

Reading Human Sign

Dirty Tricks

Natural Routes

SECTION TWO: HOOVED ANIMALS

Family Cervidae

New World Moose

Wapiti, or American Elk

Whitetailed Deer

Mule Deer

Caribou

Family Suidae

Wild Pig

Collared Peccary

SECTION THREE: PAWED ANIMALS

Family Canidae

Gray Wolf

Coyote

Gray Fox

Red Fox

Family Felidae

Mountain Lion

Bobcat

Lynx

Family Ursidae

The Bears

Black Bear

Brown Bear

Family Procyonidae

Raccoon

Family Sciuridae

Gray Squirrel

Woodchuck

Family: Erethizontidae

Porcupine

Family Leporidae

Snowshoe Hare

Eastern Cottontail Rabbit

INTRODUCTION

Everything that moves over the earth, even under water, leaves a sign that it passed there; it falls to a tracker to recognize and follow those clues.

Before learning the fun techniques described in this book, bear in mind that a tracker appreciates every aspect of nature, and abides by the Scouting motto of Leave No Trace. Always respect wildlife and do not interfere with their natural habits. Everything that touches or moves over the earth leaves a sign of its passing (one old tracking proverb says that even an eagle can be tracked if it poops often enough). Since the earliest hominids (our ancestral humans) learned to live together in tribal communities, trackers were among a tribe’s most highly regarded members. It was they who were relied upon to track the animals their brethren ate to within range of a primitive weapon, and then to continue to track them until they were rendered into meat.

Still in use by aboriginal societies today, primitive bows are under-powered by modern archery standards, yet effective enough to keep entire tribes fed, providing hunters are also skilled trackers.

Until the invention of modern hunting weapons, animals as large as deer did not often die with the first shot, especially if the weapon used was a bow and arrow or a lance. Even today, African Bushmen take it for granted that an antelope shot by their most skilled archer will need to be tracked for miles, and shot perhaps twice more before it dies. You can imagine how hard it was for Sioux hunters to take down a bison on the plains of western America.

The ability to track and read sign is the closest that any of us will come to having a genuine super power. That’s why forensic crime scene investigation shows have been so popular on television. To come onto a scene and use only your own senses of sight, touch, smell, and even taste to interpret what happened before you got there can be a pretty impressive feat. A skilled tracker or forensics expert can not only tell what has happened, but how long ago it occurred, and sometimes a good deal more that escapes notice by an ordinary person. As TV ratings show, the ability to create a true story from evidence at or around a scene is pretty amazing to people who lack the expertise to do that themselves.

In the old West, a tracker could tell if the person being trailed was wearing a six gun, and even the hip on which he wore it. The gun itself didn’t weigh enough to show in the tracks, but it made its wearer walk more heavily on that side, and to place that foot differently than the other. A similar occurrence happens if a person has a bow or camera bag slung over one shoulder; having the added bulk will make its wearer drag a foot slightly on that side.

Or a person may have a limp. A limp causes the foot on the side with the injury or deformity to hit the ground harder, leaving a deeper outer-heel imprint and usually with a more toes-inward track. However, a limp is an anomaly, and not all of them are identical, depending on their cause. A limp is identifiable, however, by being consistently abnormally different (anomalous) from a typical footstep.

Likewise if a person or an animal is injured on one leg, the prints left by that foot will be less heavily imprinted, usually twisted to one side as the bearer seeks to place the hurt foot so that it causes as little pain as possible. In most cases, the opposite, uninjured leg will bear more weight than usual, leaving extra-heavy foot impressions. All of this and more will be covered in detail in later chapters.

Even a raven might leave a visible sign that it has been there when it pulls a feather free while preening itself on an overhead branch.

But tracking is far more than just interpreting footfall impressions in the earth. Everything that moves across or interacts in any way with the features of the land is bound to leave sign. A grouse may preen free one of its down feathers as it grooms itself on an overhead branch, or sometimes a sandhill crane or raven pulls free a flight feather as it probes its plumage for fleas.

A wolf, coyote, fox, or deer all shed their dense winter coats in clumps after each winter (March or April, depending on latitude, or how cold their normal climate is). These clumps of fur often get snagged by brush, or just fall free, as the animal passes through, especially if branches don’t have leaves on them yet. This is where reading sign shows its value: tufts of wolf and coyote fur might be difficult to tell apart, especially since the two species have been interbreeding to create coywolves for nearly two decades. But a full-grown wolf stands a foot taller at the shoulder than a large coyote, so if the fur snagged is four feet above the ground, it’s too high to have been left there by a shorter coyote.

On the other hand, there have for centuries been beaver-toppled trees whose cut height is four or five feet above the ground, leading to stories of gigantic beavers. A tracker knows that those beavers were normal size, they were just standing on top of two or three feet of hard-packed snow when they gnawed the tree down, making them seem that much taller when the snow is gone.

Tufts of fur from an animal that’s shedding its warm winter coat in preparation for summer often get snagged by branches as it passes through.

Or consider the rough black scars on the normally smooth-barked aspen trees in the western United States or the very similar poplar trees of the East. While white-tailed and mule deer winter primarily on cedar and pine foliage, elk (wapiti) and moose make a diet of tender smooth bark during the snowy months. Scarred, rough black patches of bark, often showing sidewise scrape marks from the grazing animals’ bottom teeth (deer and bison lack top teeth), are a sure sign of elk or moose living in the area.

As this birch stump demonstrates, its trunk was gnawed through by beavers when there were different levels of snow on the ground.

Squirrel hunters learned a long time ago, when any accurate rifle-bored muzzle-loading long arm of 45 caliber or less was commonly known as a squirrel gun, and bushy-tailed tree-dwelling rodents often meant the difference between eating well and malnutrition, to take note of oak and other nut-bearing twigs that had been snipped free of their parent branches. Especially common in early to late autumn, when squirrels gather nutty, storable maple samaras (whirligigs), fruits from gnawed-open walnuts, hickory, and pecan nuts, twig ends, nipped off by the rodents’ sharp, stepped incisors litter the ground beneath their parent trees. Savvy squirrel hunters have long known to just take a seat and wait for the animals to come down to retrieve their prizes. Orchard owners wrap young, smooth-barked fruit trees with protective plastic to keep rabbits and hares from gnawing off the bark near ground level, especially in winter, and these species do the same to smooth-barked shrubs and trees in the wild.

Other obvious, but sometimes unrecognized signs include deer beds made from packed-down grasses, de-barked pieces of green branches left by beavers, fuzzy round beds on the ground where a litter of precocious (fast-growing) hares were recently born, and furry balls wrapped around small bones under a tree branch that were regurgitated by owls. If it sounds like there are enough animal tracks and signs to spend your entire life just learning them all, there are indeed.

A few generations ago, it was a Scout who rescued lost hikers, not the other way around; a tracker is by definition comfortable in any wilderness.

But that’s the beauty and the fascination of being a tracker. Some folks spend their entire lives watching and cataloging birds (ornithologists). Some, as previously mentioned, attend universities to learn similar skills for solving crimes as forensics investigators. Some collect coins (numismatists), some collect stamps (philatelists).

Being a plain old tracker is the coolest activity of them all, whether you’re lucky enough and skilled enough to do it at a professional level, or just as a hobby. Tracking and reading sign is the epitome of what a Scout should be.

A tracker is never unprepared for the environment, be it mosquito-infested tundra, hip-deep snow, or an unpredicted flash flood. Likewise, if it’s a possibility, a Scout should be ready to meet it, and if a Scout isn’t ready to meet it, he sure should be ready to cope with it. A tracker can help to find lost people, while never becoming a victim himself. A tracker needs more than just survival tools, but that equipment will be covered later.

Not everyone lives in an environment that enables them to track bears or wolves. There is no education better than years of field experience, but the problem with that is that it takes years of field experience to get that education. This book offers a shortcut by packing a lifetime of tracking experience in one place, condensing years of useful information into a few pages that you can memorize, or at least reference as you need to.

There was a time when the Scouts, even whole troops, were sometimes called upon to find victims who were lost in the wilderness and to assist in rescues after a flood or some other catastrophe. A Scout who can track, read sign, and make sense from his surroundings may provide valuable services to others in any number of situations. The contents of this book are intended to help Scouts and anyone else to become assistants to first responders, emergency services, and even the heroes that they can be.

In the meanwhile, learning to track and read sign is just plain fun, so take this book into the woods, to a city park, or even into your own backyard, and just have a good time.

USING THIS BOOK

Even a good photo is only two-dimensional, without depth, often unable to show important details that are visible to the eye. In such instances, a drawing might better illustrate the more important points.

To track down a wild animal on its own turf, using your own intelligence and skills to defeat an animal’s superior senses, is one of the greatest thrills you can have. This field guide is intended to be a complete field reference for would-be trackers, who may need every technique and trick they can use to find, trail, and outwit the animals they track. Based on the theory that one picture can equal a thousand words, this book is heavily illustrated. Both photos and illustrations are used because drawings can sometimes better accentuate important details, while a camera reproduces only two dimensions, without depth or distance. Where needed, illustrations have been used to highlight nuances, like differences in pressure and depth, that would be obvious in the field, but not in a photo.

The book is divided into two sections: First is a catalog of common characteristics and information that applies to nearly all animals, even on other continents (if you can recognize a cat track in North America, you’ll at least know that a leopard track in Africa was made by a cat). Section Two contains specific data about game species in North America, including details that distinguish a species from other members of its taxonomic Family. Each section contains real-world tracking information arranged in a format that makes looking up answers in the field fast and easy.

Finally, this book is written in appreciation of Scouts, whose contribution and hard work have historically helped to preserve, restore, and foster an appreciation of natural treasures that everyone can enjoy. Not every tracker is a Scout, but every Scout and outdoorsman needs a working knowledge of tracking techniques.

SECTION ONE

PRINCIPLES OF TRACKING AND READING SIGN

1

GENERICS OF ANIMAL TRACKS AND PHYSIOLOGY

Can you see the front and hind bear tracks in this photo? Many people whom you might show them to cannot, a constant source of frustration for a tracker. The more skilled you become, the more common this problem will be.

Following creatures that move over land by the disturbances they leave is not an art, but a science comprised of empirical (known) information and quantifiable (measurable) data. Reading sign, which includes following footprints, is the original forensic science, where an investigator collects visual and other clues from the environment, then interprets and assembles those bits of knowledge, like a jigsaw puzzle, to form a picture of what happened there.

Most fundamental is learning to recognize sign when you see it. There has never been a tracker who hasn’t been confounded when they showed someone else a track, only to have that person say Where? The illustrations and photos on these pages will help you to recognize partial tracks and disturbances.

The best trackers possess intimate knowledge of their prey’s needs and habits. A moose tracker needs to know that the species will never be far from aquatic plants that are a mainstay of its diet, and a pronghorn hunter wouldn’t bother looking for this open-range species in the deep woods. No species lives in a habitat that doesn’t provide for its needs, and the better a place suits an animal’s living requirements, the more likely that it will be found there.

Generics of Animal Tracking

In contrast, this drawing of brown bear tracks highlights points where a bear applies most of its weight, making it easier to decipher what you might be seeing in an otherwise confusing impression.

Nature is the very definition of order and logic; millions of years of natural selection ensure that nothing in it is without purpose, and trackers should always operate from a mindset that every mystery has a logical explanation. The advantage for a tracker is that successful adaptations tend to be repeated, regardless of species, and some are virtually universal, whether the animal is a fox or an elephant.

Front and hind tracks are usually easy to differentiate, because forefeet are noticeably larger in most species, particularly the fast runners. Reasons include a barrel chest that permits maximum lung volume while in flight or pursuit, but makes its owner front-heavy. Forefeet, which hit the ground first at a running gait, require greater surface area for traction and weight distribution (flotation) on snow and soft surfaces. Independently movable toes are generically tipped with hard keratin, usually in the form of claws or hooves, which serve as tools, weapons, brakes, and traction control when making abrupt changes in direction.

The Quadrupedal Design

As this black bear cub’s right hind foot clearly exemplifies, every animal is born having the tools and weapons with which to cope with its home environment.

Higher animals have four legs, never three or five, because countless generations have proved that the quadrupedal design is most effective for life on uneven ground. The design ensures that at least two feet are on the ground at all times, minimizing the chance of injuries, and maximizing balance. Quadrupeds typically have heavily muscled hind quarters that can propel them up to several times their own body lengths, resulting in running speeds—actually a series of leaps—that can surpass the fastest human by two or three times. Increased weight distribution also means greater stealth, because feet contact the ground more softly.

Paw Anatomy