Animal Tracking Basics

Offers expert instruction and in-the-field advice for the novice and experienced tracker Tracking wildlife successfully requires more than just looking for trails and scat. It requires an awareness of how an animal behaves in its environment--how it finds food, travels, and rests. A tracker must know how to find and interpret behavioral clues animals leave behind. This how-to book teaches the basics of being a successful tracker--explaining what to look for to find or identify an animal and how to develop an essential environmental awareness. Also describes aging tracks and sign, understanding ecology and mapping, keeping field notes, using track tools, and making casts.

Tracking is an art form as well as a skill. But it is an art that can be taught and a skill that can be acquired. Cleve Cheney, a master at tracking both animals and humans, defines tracking as "learning to use all your senses to monitor your surroundings and to make logical and realistic deductions from what you have observed." He has brought together a massive amount of information on the how, when, and where of tracking.

Guide to identifying mammals in North America through tracking, and using this information in understanding their behavior.

Songbirds, waterfowl, owls, shorebirds, warblers, woodpeckers, nightjars, birds of prey. Dozens of feather groups photographed in color.

Techniques from international tracking experts applicable to any quarry and terrain. How to follow and find elk, deer, bears, cougars, lions, elephants, leopards, rhinos, and cape buffalo.

Featuring all-new spoor drawings, some 200 new photographs and an extra 35 species, this fully revised and updated edition of the ever-popular Tracker Manualis packed with the latest on the art of tracking. Based on information developed by some of southern Africa’s best traditional trackers, Tracker Manual gives even more guidance on how to identify the spoor of some 190 animal species. Individual chapters cover carnivores, large mammals, antelopes, small mammals, primates, hares and rodents, amphibians and reptiles, birds and insects. Each account contains: Simple, bulleted text on key points of each animal’s tracks. Clear, accurate track drawings. Numerous informative photographs, sometimes annotated. A list of similar tracks (where applicable), to avoid misidentification. An instructive introduction describes the science of tracking and outlines what to look for in the field, while a quick-reference table compares tracks that are easily confused. This detailed and richly illustrated manual to the region’s most common animal tracks and signs will prove invaluable in the field. Sales points: Presents the tracks and signs of over 190 different animals. Written and illustrated by experts in the field. Compact, portable and easy to use. Rich in visual detail. Useful instructive introduction to tracking.

It's possible to safely see fascinating wildlife—if you know what to look for and where, and if you understand what you see—whether you are far from civilization or right in your own backyard. Wildlife of the Pacific Northwest includes illustrated descriptions for more than 180 mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and invertebrates most common in Washington, Oregon, British Columbia, northern California, Idaho, and western Montana. With more than 460 photographs, hundreds of scale drawings, and more than 90 distribution maps. This book belongs in every pack and is a must-have for nature lovers of all ages and skill levels.

This book guides animal ecologists, biologists and wildlife and data managers through a step-by-step procedure to build their own advanced software platforms to manage and process wildlife tracking data. This unique, problem-solving-oriented guide focuses on how to extract the most from GPS animal tracking data, while preventing error propagation and optimizing analysis performance. Based on the open source PostgreSQL/PostGIS spatial database, the software platform will allow researchers and managers to integrate and harmonize GPS tracking data together with animal characteristics, environmental data sets, including remote sensing image time series, and other bio-logged data, such as acceleration data. Moreover, the book shows how the powerful R statistical environment can be integrated into the software platform, either connecting the database with R, or embedding the same tools in the database through the PostgreSQL extension Pl/R. The client/server architecture allows users to remotely connect a number of software applications that can be used as a database front end, including GIS software and WebGIS. Each chapter offers a real-world data management and processing problem that is discussed in its biological context; solutions are proposed and exemplified through ad hoc SQL code, progressively exploring the potential of spatial database functions applied to the respective wildlife tracking case. Finally, wildlife tracking management issues are discussed in the increasingly widespread framework of collaborative science and data sharing. GPS animal telemetry data from a real study, freely available online, are used to demonstrate the proposed examples. This book is also suitable for undergraduate and graduate students, if accompanied by the basics of databases.