On track: At the Riekes Center in Menlo Park, people learn the ancient art of tracking to explore the wider world of nature On track: At the Riekes Center in Menlo Park, people learn the ancient art of tracking to explore the wider world of nature (January 16, 2002)

By David Boyce

Almanac Staff Writer

Humans living in San Mateo County in the 21st century don't often compare their lives and experiences with those who lived 5,000 or 10,000 years ago. The expanse of time is vast and seems beyond the reach of all but the most vivid imagination.

But in two respects, we are probably much the same as our prehistoric ancestors: First, our bodies haven't changed much. We have the same physique, the same needs to eat and sleep, and the same intellectual capabilities to deal with problems confronting us.

We also share with our ancestors many experiences that easily stretch across thousands of years: We sense that the air is fresher after a rain. We know that cougars inhabit the woods though we may never see them. We hear birds singing in the trees.

Humans have always noted such experiences. Today we may note them in passing, but there was a time when a select group of people studied them, analyzing the smells, sights, textures and events of the natural world. They were hunters, family providers and sons, but when they were on the trail of an animal, they were trackers.

Trackers of that time asked questions of the natural world that existed in abundance all around them and they applied their senses to pick out answers from the wealth of detail that nature provided.

It should come as no surprise that the natural world continues to provide the same kinds of detailed information today, but is anyone still asking the kinds of questions they asked long ago? At the Riekes Center for Human Enhancement near Menlo Park, they are.

Master tracker Jon Young, 41, who heads up the Nature Studies program at the center, has been tracking animals since the age of 10, when he became the protege of another master tracker.

Mr. Young says his lifelong commitment to tracking brings him many personal benefits. As he puts it, tracking is an "integration of five senses through an advanced understanding of ecology, psychology, body language, weather and how it all merges to create this incredible relationship."

He also says that tracking has a critical role to play in conducting wildlife surveys and is an especially useful skill today when the tracker can use a hand-held computer to capture data about animal populations.

Mr. Young's understudies at the Riekes Center are girls and boys, men and women, all focusing their curiosity, time and energy on absorbing the tracking wisdom of long-forgotten elders. Mr. Young says he and his fellow mentors pass on this wisdom in the same way that it came to him. "We don't teach tracking," he says. "They learn it on their own."

What is tracking

When animals go out to hunt or feed, Mr. Young says, they tend to use regular routes, making frequent stops to mark territory and evaluate the area for threats and opportunities. While they're active, each animal leaves many signs of its passage, most of them too subtle for the average human to notice.

A bent branch could be a cat's territorial mark, where it stops to rub its cheek. If the branch was chewed instead of bent, the angle of the remaining end can reveal the species of animal that did the chewing.

Although such signs may at first look like nothing at all, Mr. Young, seasoned by decades of experience, is quick to point out that nothing in nature happens without a cause. Trackers can pick out details like these and extract from them a surprising amount of data.

Trackers use the regular habits of animals to learn about them, Mr. Young says. One habit of many four-legged animals is their tendency to walk in their own footsteps. Like a tiger in the zoo who wear spots through the paint of a cage floor with endless pacing, a cat in the wild will retrace its steps through the grass upon each visit to a favorite hunting site, he says.

Mr. Young says that every animal also has a preferred rate of travel, which it will revert to unless it is feeding, hunting or being chased. While in this baseline gait, the animal's rear feet tend to land in the footprints made by the front feet. This one piece of information can lead to a surprising number of conclusions.

For example, if a tracker sees a coyote's rear footprints suddenly start to land ahead of front footprints, it has shifted to what trackers call an anxiety gait, Mr. Young says. Perhaps the coyote sensed a cougar in the vicinity. If the rear footprints start landing behind the front ones, the coyote has slowed down to gather information, as when it detects a scent of a rabbit.

Mr. Young says humans have similar traits. We each have a pace that we prefer for most situations, but it's not the pace we use when hurrying to the dry cleaners in the rain, nor do we use it when window shopping on a summer day.

Along with the animal's gait, the tracker considers the type and condition of vegetation, the time of day, the presence of trails, and the condition of the footprints to get a sense of why the animal changed its pace.

From a few footprints, a trained tracker can identify the animal's species, its gender, its mood, its health, its energy level and its age. A footprint deteriorates visibly, beginning almost from the moment it is made. The wind softens its edges and deposits bits of detritus into it. Insects cross it, leaving tiny streams of evenly-spaced prints. Uneven depths within it can reveal the direction of the animal's head when the print was made.

When a particular animal's footprints are mixed up with those of other animals and humans, the tracker can make sense of the scene. To experts like Mr. Young and his colleagues, confused tracks are engaging rather than annoying, like the converging and diverging plot lines of a complex story.

Bobcats at Ano Nuevo

At Ano Nuevo State Reserve, local trackers know that bobcats roam the grassy sand dunes at night looking for rabbits and voles. They also know that the cats tend to use park's hiking trails for their patrols and that they like to pause at the outer curved edges of bends in the winding paths.

From these warm and relatively windless vantage points, Mr. Young says, the cat can see along the path in both directions. Evidence of this behavior is clear to the alert observer: The grass is sparse and exhibits wear patterns where the cats pause to take in the scene. Little piles of bobcat dung appear at every outer curve, their scent that much more effective for the lack of wind, he says.

This kind of detailed knowledge is the result of training and days spent tracking in a particular region. Such careful study leads eventually to the ability to think like the animal, Mr. Young says. Trackers can understand and predict a wild animal's behavior, a skill that bestows an intoxicating feeling of wilderness authority and kinship with life.

Learning to track

The skills of trackers at the Nature Studies program came to them through a slender chain of three people, each a vital link.

Mr. Young says he started tracking at age 10 in New Jersey after meeting Tom Brown, a famous tracker who learned the art firsthand in the New Jersey pine barrens from an elderly Native American tracker named Stalking Wolf. Mr. Brown was looking for a protege and chose to mentor Jon in the same way Stalking Wolf had mentored him, he says.

Mr. Young went on to college at Rutgers University, where he designed his own major in natural history and anthropology. At the age of 23, he founded the Wilderness Awareness school in Red Bank, New Jersey.

In 1995, he opened branches in Washington state and California, and in 1997, he started the Ano Nuevo Tracking Club, which meets on the second Sunday of every month.

The tracking program at the Riekes Center reflects the idea he says he's had since college: to create a group of tracking mentors who will bring along new talent, hoping eventually to have 5,000 trackers using their skills in the nation's wild, rural, suburban and urban environments.

Mr. Young says that one important step toward this goal would be recognition of animal tracking as a science. He considers tracking to be a true science because he says trackers use a scientific method: They develop and test refutable hypotheses based on careful observation of physical evidence.

Uses of tracking

Given the wealth of detail trackers can gather, they have been called upon to help in wildlife surveys. Mr. Young says that information gathered over the space of a few days by several trackers acting in concert can be far more detailed and far less invasive than fitting an animal with a radio-transmitting collar.

To get an accurate picture of a particular wildlife population, footprints are not even necessary for the skilled tracker. Mr. Young frequently uses a method called secondary tracking that allows the tracker to "learn the habits of predators by knowing the habits of prey," he says.

As an example of secondary tracking, Mr. Young says that the baseline gait of coyotes in Montana differs markedly from that of coyotes living in New Jersey. He says he struggled for some time to find a reason for this behavior, finally attributing the difference to the fact that the Montana coyotes live in an area where cougars also live.

In San Mateo County, secondary tracking allows him to use the extent of foliage grazed by deer in local woodlands to infer the presence or absence of cougars. While secondary tracking was surely practiced long ago and is a hard-won skill in a present-day tracker's arsenal, today's practitioners are not averse to the benefits conferred on many activities by the use of high technology.

CyberTracker

The CyberTracker program brings high technology to the art and science of tracking. Using a handheld computer equipped with a global positioning device and CyberTracker software, trackers describe a footprint or other sign of an animal's passage by checking off items in a progressively more specific list of characteristics.

The CyberTracker interface presents the user with a series of icons, with each icon representing a choice. For example, one screen asks the user to state what was seen: the actual animal or its track. If it was a visual sighting, the next screen asks for the compass bearing and distance.

If the evidence is only a track, the next screen offers a choice of several categories to describe the track, such as hoofed, pawed, avian or reptilian. Subsequent screens ask for further details, including the animal's species, its gender (if it can be determined) and what the animal was doing -- eating, drinking, or running.

Given the high level of detail available to a trained tracker, Mr. Young says this technology is enhancing the process of conducting wildlife surveys by augmenting less informative survey methods such as tagging animals with radio collars.

The CyberTracker software was invented by South African Louis Liebenburg to enlist the assistance of the San people in conducting wildlife surveys of the Kalahari Desert in Namibia. The San, also known as Bushmen, are the indigenous people of this desert and have lived there for 20,000 years. They have a reputation as superb trackers and hunters in an extremely harsh environment.

In a testament to both human intelligence and good software design, when introduced to the CyberTracker system, the Bushmen, with no previous hand-held computer experience, reportedly mastered the program in about 30 minutes.