My first tracking eval in Namibia, I don’t think I broke fifty percent.
The way
CyberTracker evals work is pretty straightforward: the evaluator points out a track or sign, and you give an ID as your answer. Sometimes there are more questions: what activity or behavior is responsible for what you’re seeing; if it’s a footprint, you might have to say which foot, as well as the animal that made it. The questions have varying levels of difficulty and are scored accordingly; a harder question is worth more points if you get it right, and you lose fewer points if you get it wrong.
Last time, the ungulates got me.
A key element of tracking is knowing the possibilities. If I find hoofprints in a forest in the Pacific Northwest, it’s very unlikely to be a zebra (unless, you know,
this happens). But when I was asked to assess a single-toed hoofprint on the shore of a shallow lake surrounded by tall grass in the Kalahari Desert, zebra had to be on the list of possibilities.
Two ungulate tracks, two different species. (Roan and wildebeest, in this instance.)So did donkeys and horses, incidentally. It’s the rare location when tracking that you don’t have to consider domestic animals as well.
Similarly, in Washington State, if you find a two-toed ungulate track, you can count the number of reasonable possibilities on the fingers of one hand. On top of which, in many parts of the state, only one or two of those possibilities are going to be relevant. On my land in Thurston County, the options are deer or elk, with an outside chance of a neighbor’s goat going on a wander.
In the Nyae Nyae Conservancy, where the eval I’ve taken twice now took place, there were eight: duiker, steenbok, impala, kudu, roan, oryx, wildebeest, and giraffe.
Roan track in tricky substrate. Just as clear as in the field guides.Discerning between these isn’t an impossible task. Giraffe feet are so large that you really aren’t going to mistake their tracks for anything else. In cases where different species have similarly sized feet—duiker and steenbok, in this instance, or roan, oryx, and wildebeest—then you have to start considering things like shape of foot, whether an animal tends to step in its own tracks or not, baseline gaits, and preferred habitats. (This is where having a wildlife biology background can come in handy, though practice and an obsession with field guides will also do the trick.)
Field guides such as this one for instance.For my first eval in Africa, though, it was all very bewildering. Until that week I hadn’t known what a duiker was. Spending some quality time with field guides prior to the trip would have helped with that, but, well, I didn’t. This meant that I learned about the existence, behaviors, and even appearance of several species initially through their tracks. (Aardwolf was another one.) I learned that jackals have a lot in common, in terms of both tracks and behavior, with coyotes. I learned that oryxes have shorter legs relative to their body size, and therefore tend to understep when walking, so their hind feet come down short of their fronts. I learned that aardwolf tracks look a lot like hyenas’, only smaller. When I finally saw the animals that made these tracks, I could map their physical attributes to what I’d seen on the ground: the jackal’s lively trot, so like a coyote’s; the oryx’s short hind legs; aardwolves that looked a lot like hyenas, only smaller.
If I saw this in North America I’d conclude it was a small coyote.But even my second time around, with the prior eval, several more field days with master tracker’s, and some quality time with field guides under my belt, those eight ungulates occasionally stymied me. Differences in substrate, in weather when the tracks were made, in what the weather had done since, in gait, and even in age of the animal in question were confounding factors.
Tracking isn’t just a way of knowing a landscape. Often, it also tells you how much you have left to learn.
A group of trackers in our natural environment: poring over marks in the dust.(Originally posted at Following Curiosity. You can comment here or there.)![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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