Tracks: An Animal Tracking Book for Kids

By Ann Schaefer, John Schaefer and Tina Howell

It's Time to Become Forensic Animal Detectives!

Have you gone camping and discovered in the morning that you had a visitor while you were sleeping? 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Backwoods Publishing
• Release date: Oct 8, 2020
• ISBN: 9780578721873

Book preview

Tracks

An Animal Tracking Book

for Kids

by Ann Schaefer, Ryan Schaefer,

John Schaefer, & Tina Howell

Copyright © 2020 by Ann Schaefer, Ryan Schaefer, John Schaefer and Tina Howell

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Printed in the United States of America

Print ISBN: 9780578721866

E-Book ISBN: 9780578721873

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Canoe Tree Press is a division of DartFrog Books.

Table of Contents

Let’s Have An Adventure!!

Measurements and Strides

Creating Your Own Tracking Plate

Plaster Casting Tracks

Scat and Track Identification Games

Bears

Wolves

Coyote

Red Fox

Bighorn Sheep

Mountain Goat

Bison

Moose

Caribou

Pronghorn

Mule Deer

White-Tailed Deer

Elk

Wild Boar

Snowshoe Hare

Mountain Cottontail Rabbit

American Pika

Beaver

Hooded Skunk

Striped Skunk

Porcupine

Northern River Otter

Raccoon

North American Badger

Virginia Opossum

Black-Tailed Prairie Dog

Least Chipmunk

Fox Squirrel

Cougar

Bobcat

American Alligator

Green Sea Turtle

American Bullfrog

Western Toad

Prairie Rattlesnake

Wild Turkey

Ring-necked Pheasant

American White Pelican

California Quail

Mallard Duck

Canada Goose

Great Blue Heron

Answer Key

Glossary

Bibliography

Let’s Have An Adventure!!

Have you gone camping and discovered in the morning that you had a visitor while you were sleeping? Have you gone out to the woods and seen a fleeting glimpse of a critter only to find it left a few signs of some of its activities? After a fresh snow have you run into your backyard to discover you weren’t the first one to make tracks?

It’s time to become forensic animal detectives!

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Did you know the average bald eagle nest is 4-5 feet in diameter and 2-4 feet deep? Each year the adult pair will add 1-2 feet of new material to the nest. The largest recorded bald eagle nest located in St. Petersburg Florida was 9.5 feet in diameter, 20 feet deep and weighed almost 3 tons!

Did you know that animals leave signs that help tell who they were and what they have been up to? By learning to identify these signs you can recognize what animal left them and get a little glimpse into their lives.

Animal tracks are left everywhere around you. Next time you go out your door look for these animal tracks. These can tell you if they are walking, feeding, pursuing prey, or evading predators. Sometimes these signs can even tell you if the animal was male or female. Additional signs, like chewed beaver logs, rotten insect logs, scat, rubs and wallows can tell you how they live and what they feed on.

There are some important tools you will need to help you examine animal tracks. The most important is something to measure with either a tape measure or a ruler. We have included a ruler on the last page of this book. Many animal tracks, like the deer and the elk, look very similar and the difference between the animal tracks is simply the size of the track. And to determine if an animal was walking, trotting or on the run it is best to have a tape measure to look at the distance between the tracks.

In this book we will teach you how to identify the animal tracks. You can keep track of the different animal tracks or signs that you have discovered and keep a record of where and when you found these signs. You can have an adult initial when you have identified each track.

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So grab a tape measure, ask your parent’s permission and lets head outside!

Measurements and Strides

Let’s learn a little animal anatomy or parts of the animal’s body, to help speak the animal language.

The toes of all animals are numbered from the inside of the foot, closest to the middle of the animal, to the outside of the animal. If you look at the back of your own hand, your thumb is #1 and your pinky finger is #5. In birds, toe #1 is not always present but when it is, it points backwards. In birds, toe #5 is absent. With amphibians, toe # 1 is absent on their front foot but remains on their hind foot. Alligators show all 5 toes in their front track, yet only 4 toes in their hind track.

Not all animals have large #1 toes: some do not have these toes at all, and in others the toe may be very small and higher up on the animal’s leg like a dog. This high, small toe #1 is called a dew claw, shown in the diagram.

In deer, elk and sheep and other ungulates (hoofed animals) toe #1 is absent and toes #2 and #5 are smaller and are called the dew claws.

When measuring the track, you need to measure the minimum outline, the floor of the track. This will give more accurate information and help with identification.

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Measuring strides can give a great deal of information. Trots, a gait in which evenly spaced footprints alternate on right and left sides of the line of travel, can indicate when a badger is actively hunting. Different kinds of strides are hops, bounds, lopes, gallops, pronks (like a deer jumping with all four legs at one time), walks, and skips. Various interpretations can be made from looking at these strides. These interpretations differ in different habitats and are not always exact.

A walk is a slow gait in which each foot moves independently. At no point during the walking cycle with four feet, does the animal loose contact with the ground. A direct register track is where a hind foot lands on top of where the front foot stepped. If the hind footsteps beyond where the front foot had been, this is called an overstep. When an animal, such as a cat, stalks, it moves only one foot at a time cautiously and slowly. When a stalking animal moves the right rear foot forward and steps, then the right front moves and steps down; then the left rear followed by the left front. The trail is a track that results with the rear tracks pairing up with the front tracks, called an understep walk. With this understep walk, the hind track is found behind the front track (Elbroch, 2003).

Photo courtesy of Troy LaFleur

A walking gait can help interpret the animal’s size. With a normal walking gait pattern, the stride is 1 to 1.25 times longer than the distance from the hip to the shoulder of the animal. An estimated head length and rump length needs to be added to this length, the sum of which will then give us an estimate for the size of the animal.

Speed can also affect a gait pattern in a trail. Three rules of animal physiology demonstrate how speed can change the trail pattern.

As speed increases, the hind foot lands farther forward than the front track on the same side. As speed decreases, the hind foot lands farther back in relation to the front track.

As the speed of the animal increases, the track stride length increases.

As the speed of the animal increases, the straddle or width of the track group decreases. (Halfpenny, 2015)

Some possible interpretation examples includes the following: For a coyote the under-step walk can mean extreme rest, while an overstep walk can mean exploration. The direct register walk can mean hunting. The extended direct register walk can mean they are excited. The slow lope can mean play and communication. The coyote lope can mean discomfort or fear. The coyote bound can mean alarm or fear. The coyote gallop can mean fear. Different animal strides will have different meanings.

Measuring strides can help us identify the animal. It is important to measure the floor of the track and not the walls or drag marks. Make sure to measure the claw or nail marks but not the dew claws from hoofed animals. Trots and walks are measured from the tip of the front track to the tip of the next front track. A trail width known as straddle is taken from their widest points. Measuring the trails can help with identification of an animal when it is too difficult to identify the animal from the track alone

At times it is difficult to locate an entire stride. There is still information, however, that can be gathered from single tracks. For example, if the dirt is disturbed toward the toe of a hoofed animal such an elk, this means the elk is loping or galloping. Additionally, especially if you are hunting, looking at the track in the snow and seeing if there are crystals on the outside edge is one of the only ways to tell how old a track is. If the crystals are there, then the track is older. It can also be important to note specific events, such as the last time it rained. Checking to see if a track if has been disturbed by rain (looks like edges have melted), can help you determine the age of a track.

Creating Your Own Tracking Plate

(Bring the Tracks to You!!)

You can create your own track plate to get animals to leave tracks giving you some additional practice at identifying the tracks. You will need some supplies:

Supplies:

• A large box

• Rubbing alcohol

• Tape

• A medium paintbrush

• A bowl

• Contact paper

• A cutting utensil or scissors

• Some sort of bait like peanut butter

• Powdered chalk. (I like straight line chalk that is used for straight line strings in construction, this can usually be found at hardware stores.)

First cut off one end of the box. The size of the animal you will get can depend on the size of your box. When I am trying to get some larger animals, I will cut off one side and the top.

Place a thick strip of contact paper toward the opening of your box, sticky side down. Then use another piece of contact paper with the sticky side up to line the rest of the bottom of your box. I usually use 4 pieces of tape to help affix this contact paper to the floor of the box.

Next, in a bowl mix rubbing alcohol and chalk until you have a thin paste. The amounts of alcohol and chalk in the end will really not matter. You want this runny enough to be able to paint a consistent coat of paste on your contact paper that has the sticky side down. Paint the contact paper that is closer to the opening all the way to the sides of the box. When the alcohol evaporates this leaves a perfect layer of chalk for the animal to walk through. Then when the animal steps on the sticky contact paper it will leave a perfect chalk track.

Don’t forget the bait: smear some peanut butter on the rear wall of your box. Leave the box outside on level ground and check back the next day. The best placement would be on a well-used animal trail.

It can take a couple attempts or multiple tracking plates to get an animal to leave its marks. Keep in mind, if it rains, the contact paper will no longer be sticky and will need to be replaced. After a day, check your tracking plate for tracks. You can carefully peel up the tracked paper and place plain paper on it. Then when you turn it over you have secured your tracks for identification.

Plaster Casting Tracks

Another fun way to help you examine your tracks is to create a plaster cast. When I have difficulty identifying a track, I find that if I can make a cast, it can show wonderful detail and preserve this evidence

The supplies you will need are:

• Plaster of Paris (this can be picked up at hardware stores, do not get Polyplaster or plaster for wallboard or patching compound; these do not get hard enough to preserve a cast.)

• A container to carry a portion in. Two pounds of plaster powder can make multiple casts.

• A flexible plastic cup, for example a medium size soda cup.

• A bottle of water will be needed if no water source is available

• A heavy duty spatula or spoon will be needed for mixing.

I keep a backpack loaded with these supplies when I head out for tracking.

1. Find some tracks you want to cast. Pick out