A Dirt-Based Community

My Track and Sign Evaluation in Montana

I’ve been interested in wildlife tracking for many years. Early in my biology career, long before widespread online learning, my only tutelage came from hunting lore, cheap reproductions of 1970s-era military manuals, and tales of mountain men and native Americans.

In the beginning, I found the idea of tracking to be akin to magic. A skilled person could rise in the morning, cast a glance out the window, and know which animals passed nearby overnight – and even determine their behavior. I’ve not changed that initial opinion much over the decades. Tracking presents an unparalleled window into the natural world and is open to anyone who chooses to pay attention.

Paying attention, I should note, involves a lot of ‘dirt time’ – hours spent close to the ground, peering at disturbances in mud, dust, soil, or snow, closely examining bent grasses, leaves, scratch marks, rocks, and scat (scat in this context is a euphemism for animal poop; see ‘civilized’, below).

There are people who can scan a landscape and read the signs before them quickly and with ease, much like the birders who can sit on a park bench and identify hundreds of bird species by song. For the record, I am not one of those people. I require a lot of time and practice (see ‘dirt time’, above).

I’ve traveled from coast to coast for work. On average, the civilized residents of North America appear to consider playing in the dirt to be a strange, possibly suspicious activity for an adult. In more cultured environs, I noticed . . . discomfort. In the presence of a man sitting on a trail, staring at the ground, people shielded their children and joggers turned around. I tried to smile or say ‘hello’ but people fastidiously avoided eye contact as they scurried by.

Over my career, I did notice some variability. Hunters often respect tracking as a tool towards very practical ends, naturalists can be more philosophical about it, while many (though certainly not all) PhD researchers find statistics and satellite imagery much more applicable to the field of wildlife study than subjective interpretations of marks on the ground.

Most recently, as people poured outdoors due to COVID-19, my unpredictable positioning on the landscape and slow progress infuriated newly-dedicated bikers and gym-deprived runners. The obsession with exercising outdoors suggested a problem with anyone who wasn’t moving fast enough.

Over time I withdrew. I unconsciously internalized the idea that tracking was best done alone and, preferably, when no one was watching.

While on a job in Montana, I noticed a Track and Sign evaluation, offered through Cybertracker North America, was being held nearby. I was intimidated by the idea of subjecting myself to a potentially embarrassing public assessment, but I finally decided that I couldn’t pass up the opportunity.

I arrived in the Swan Valley with a worn, dog-earned track guide in my pocket and a head full of doubts. Over the next two days, I was continually amazed by the ability of those around me to read the land. That was somewhat predictable; I expected a skilled evaluator.

More surprising to me was Michelle’s infectious passion. She, along with staff from the Swan Valley Connections, the organization hosting the evaluation, didn’t see tracking as an eccentric hobby. They were natural resource professionals who extolled the virtues of tracking to anyone who would listen. These trackers didn’t hide. They tracked whenever and wherever they could, following trails in the evening or stopping to mark tracks on their way to work in the morning. They didn’t isolate themselves. These trackers welcomed people into their world and occasionally married each other. When I struggled during the evaluation, they supported me.

I was apprehensive to attend an evaluation, yet I walked away determined to attend additional sessions. I was profoundly affected by the experience. I learned a great deal about tracks, yes, but I was also stuck by my brush with something larger.

I’d become aware of many tracking schools and books and skilled instructors during my travels. Yet it wasn’t until I stood in what Wikipedia calls ‘an isolated valley between the Swan and Mission mountain ranges’ during Michell’s evaluation that I recognized the possibility of a tracking community that was as welcoming as it was challenging. I glimpsed a community that encourages complete neophytes and moderately-experienced oddities like myself, accepts them into the ranks along with the undeniable experts, and strives to raise everyone up.

I admit that my path has been, and continues to be, unconventional. However, I’m convinced that the importance of such a tracking community can’t be understated. I encourage anyone who practices this ancient skill (expertly or poorly), wants to encourage other trackers, or simply sees the value of tracking as a skill to bring people closer to nature, to support the efforts of the people and groups I’ve mentioned, including Cybertracker and Cybertracker North America, in any way that you can.

Running in Slow Motion

“Yeah!” I shouted as I crested the hill. “Oh, yeah! That’s how it’s done!”

A dozen pairs of liquid brown eyes watched me as I reached the top of our rural Pennsylvania driveway. The neighbor ladies were unaccustomed to such outbursts because I usually ran in silence. They observed me for a moment from behind long lashes and then, according to some unspoken signal, returned to their business.

While the lovely ladies were eminently capable of outrunning me, and dedicated vegetarians, it might surprise you to learn that our neighbors are not especially health-conscious. In fact, I caught one girl chewing on a plastic bottle last week. Perhaps I should mention that these neighbors are cows.

I continued the cool-down portion of my run, serving as both a reward for reaching my goal and a requirement of documenting the effort (I simply cannot use the tiny face of my FitBit while running). I’ve quickly developed a love-hate relationship with the little thing but that is a topic for another day.

My celebratory shout was short-lived and, honestly, rather wheezy. I had finished another training run on my way to an eventual 5K trail run in a nearby park, scheduled for the summer solstice. I experienced some chagrin when I began ‘training’ to run a distance of 3 miles, since it seemed but a few years ago that I could hike 10 miles with a 60-pound pack at 7000 feet above sea level. 

Age and pandemics and unemployment and way too much sitting had taken their collective toll – by Christmas 2020, I was in the worst shape of my life. I had to do something. In the spring, once we were free from the necessity of awaiting our landlord’s front-end loader to clear snow from our driveway, I began running. I had no real goal in mind until I saw a flyer for the solstice run.

I’ve hiked all my life, and run in a few road races, but never done much trail running. Indeed, I spent too many years in the intermountain west, where I saw trail running as a great way to surprise bears, cougars, moose and elk, which never ends well (here is a really good article about just such an encounter and all the resulting problems. And it references a well-regarded bear biologist I met years ago when she was doing research in Big Bend National Park!). When I relocated to the east, I knew the risks of such wildlife encounters were minimal but the narrow, winding roads of rural Pennsylvania and general state of distracting driving in the world today left me unwilling to run on the asphalt.

As a result, I have run many miles around our rural property as well as up and down our driveway. These endless circles are a source of curiosity in an agricultural landscape. Farmers peer from tractor cockpits crowded with computers, staring in wonder at someone who has to time to exercise. The woman across the street watches with bemused interest as she tends her garden. Bleary-eyed long-haul truck drivers, leaving the local warehouses, do a double take. By far, the cows are my most interested neighbors, running to the fence to watch me, chasing me, then eventually losing interest until I circle back again.

Finding time and energy to train has not been easy, as I work six days a week at two jobs for 50+ hours. As the neighbors and cows can attest, though, I’ve put in the work. The plodding, wheezing, stumbling work. As my runs get longer, hotspots are broadcasting blister locations and my psyche retreats further from the pain (hence the uncharacteristically jubilant outburst at the beginning of this tale.)

I won’t have the cows cheering in late June but a few friends are promising to show up. I’ve already warned them that this run will not be a pretty one. My goal is to finish, complete with bad form, a fair to terrible race time, and no fanfare. I can explain this objective in no more simple terms than this:  I will finish this race.

No matter how I get there – whether I arrive strong and happy or crawl across the finish line – my arrival will be worth celebrating.

Rattlers: A Different Perspective

As a wildlife biologist who grew up in Texas, I read Orion magazine’s feature, A Uniquely American Animal, expecting the usual sad descriptions of the destructive and bloody rattlesnake roundup carnivals. Everyone knows that snakes suffer a withering animosity as old as humanity. It comes from the fear that our primate ancestors felt towards venomous, and legitimately dangerous, snakes. Every human across the globe shared these ancestors and this primeval fear has stayed with us. But over uncountable generations the fear has silently morphed, seamlessly arising as respect in some people and hatred in others.

The roundups and their casual brutality towards living things is, unfortunately, old news. I was unprepared for the invocation of lynching imagery, which I can only describe as indescribable. A discussion of the Gadsen Flag was unavoidable, given our political climate. In her descriptions of the rattlesnake images on war flags, or in song lyrics read by a madman, Natalie Rose Richardson paints the rattlesnake as the symbol of a violent nation.

Continue reading “Rattlers: A Different Perspective”

Timber Wars

Listening to Oregon Public Broadcasting‘s 2020 podcast Timber Wars was, for me, like traveling in time. Although I was an insignificant cog in the grand wheel of the controversy, I was witness to some of the drama. It was a brief, important experience that has resonated through my life. As a young outsider, I was perhaps ill-equipped to recognize the complexity and nuance of what was happening in and around those old growth forests, but I was a witness nonetheless.

Continue reading “Timber Wars”

The Story of a Queen

Most of my life has revolved around animals. That covers my years with wild animals as a wildlife biologist but also includes work at several domestic animal shelters. This is a story about a queen who lived at one such shelter.

Continue reading “The Story of a Queen”

Relocating Commotion-Causing Beavers

This piece was written in August of 2018 for the Utah Division of Wildlife, where I worked as a biological technician and staff wildlife biologist.

Many Utahns have experience with beavers. Unfortunately, much of that experience is less than desirable: beavers plugging up culverts, chewing down trees and flooding parking lots. The reality is that beavers can be a problem when they’re stuck in the wrong places. The flipside is that beavers are very beneficial when they’re in the right places.

Continue reading “Relocating Commotion-Causing Beavers”