By Richard McMurtry
The alarm rings in the darkness of the early morning. I hesitate a moment, then slide out of bed realizing that failure to do so will result in my being late. And then I will need to track down the trackers, rather than join them at the outset. Which is fun, of course, but not as rewarding as seeing the first tracks together.
A warm shower enlivens and awakens my body. And any remorse for the early rise is replaced by the excitement of anticipation of joining my beloved group of trackers!
I eat my breakfast of oatmeal with raisins, cinnamon, and honey; load my smoothie jar with coconut milk, banana, blueberries, date, kale, and an assortment of spices. And then slide the blended smoothie in its jar into a pocket of my car for eating on 30-minute journey to Bodega Bay. Bodega Bay is where the tracking class has been meeting for many years before I joined it four years ago.
I arrive as the trackers are already engaged in inspecting tracks in the sand at the edge of the parking lot. I don my binoculars and slide out of the seat to join them.
The track they are inspecting is round, but the toe pattern is not distinct. So, I look up the trail and down the trail to see if there are any more distinct tracks and to see if the pattern of tracks or repeating pattern of tracks discloses the gait it was moving in (walk, trot, lope or variations of the three). As it turns out, the roundness of the first track was misleading -an artifact of the sand and weathering. The other tracks clearly display four toes, with the impressions of the toes sliding into the impression made by the heel pad, suggesting raccoon. To top it off, the pattern of the tracks revealed a “2x2 walk”, meaning that there are alternating diagonal lines made with each pair of feet, like this: This is a dead giveaway as being the distinctive walk of the raccoon. 
Our leader Jim Sullivan, has been leading community-based tracking classes for at least 10 years, is a 4th generation descendant of local settlers, is an instructor at the local junior college offering tracking and bird language classes, and was one of the first 600 internationally certified animal trackers.
He patiently watches me look closely at the details of the tracks. Then he inserts, “It’s fine to look at the details, but I want you to get the visual impression of the tracks and their patterns into your memory banks; so that you identify the track and the animal that made it instantly from pattern recognition.”
He is teaching us not only cognitive information about the tracks, the track patterns, and animal behavior and ecological relationships, but also about a wholly different way of relating to information and information recall. He wants us to develop a tracker’s mind. Which includes a respect for the environment and an intimate connection with the ecosystem and its member parts. He is inviting us into a different type of knowing – one which is not based solely or even primarily on cognitive comparisons of analytical details, but rather the intuitive mind that recognizes the face of a loved one for example.
He encourages us to get more “dirt time” – meaning walking the land and observing tracks, listening to the bird calls – so that the ecosystem’s members become a part of our intuitive memory banks. And to use analytic skills when necessary.
After a few months or years, after seeing dozens and dozens of raccoon tracks in sand and in mud of various densities and moistness, one begins to interpolate the missing parts of the track by the parts that do get retained by the substrate. The three toes that are visible in a given track look just like the five toed counterparts that one has seen previously. One sees three toes with the eyes and five toes with the memory bank, or more accurately, one sees the three toes with the eyes and sees a racoon print with the memory bank.
During the four hours of this particular day, we will eventually see the tracks of skunk, fox, coyote, otter, deer, ravens, flicker, beetles, millipedes as well as numerous plants that serve as food for the creatures who passage is recorded in the sand and mud. Though we are only seeing the track, we know what the animals look like – either having seen them in the wild or in books. So, when we see the track on the ground, we see the animal in our mind’s eye. And the gait (pattern of tracks) tells us the speed that the animal was moving in which in turn implies whether he was calm and sauntering or alarmed and racing. So, the track reveals the living moving animal, not a static image.
But it is not only tracks we look for. We look for signs of animal presence. Scat (feces), regurgitations of predatory birds like owls and hawks, feed signs on vegetation, markings, nests.
Scat of animals is somewhat distinctive for each species. Bobcat and coyote scat which sometimes can appear similar can usually be distinguished by the presence of long hairs in coyote scat and the presence of hair in bobcat scat as being well digested and having the consistency of felt. Deer leave scrape marks on trees when they are scraping the “velvet” off their new antlers as well as when they are simply marking the trees during their mating season. Owls’ leave 2” long by 1” oval regurgitated balls of mostly digested food revealing their food sources, for example, the tiny jaw bone of a gopher or vole. Rabbits feeding on some vegetation will cut off the stem with a 45 degree angle though with some rushes and grasses they will cut it off straight perpendicular to the stem. Deer feeding on vegetation will grab and pull at the stem leaving a jagged cut perpendicular to the stem length. A 6’ woodrat nest reveals the complexity of this species’ housing needs and its presence in the area. A telephone pole will be a site for discovering the scat and possibly pellets of perching birds, especially raptors.
By the end of the day, one’s soul is filled with images and impressions and inferred movement and behavior of the local creatures that have become one’s friends. Not like a pet but like a valued acquaintance. Major elements of the ecosystem are imprinted in the memory banks in a way that engenders open-heartedness and, at times, love.
When I first went to this class, my attention was focused on the instructor and his co-instructor who was also a long-time tracker. But over time, I began to realize that the experience was being co-created by both the instructors, the students, and the ecosystem. Each discovery of something new by one of the students was quietly celebrated by all. Each interaction between instructor and student – imparting information or perspective or the capacity to recognize tracks and patterns was a gift to everyone there.
There is a tracker’s field of awareness that arises over time. It is focused initially on the observation of tracks and track patterns and information about species behavior patterns, eating patterns, migration patterns, population dynamics, but at some point, the soul is impressed with the ecosystem as a whole, the connection of the various animal members to the overall whole. And then at some later point, the love of the ecosystem arises and the sense of one not being separate from it. And over time, one becomes aware of the field generated by the lovers of tracking – both instructors and students. It is a shared love, a shared enjoyment. And at that point, the sense of not being separate from the body of trackers can arise for some individuals. I can’t say that everyone experiences it this way, but I notice a lot of joy and pleasure on the faces of trackers when they part at the end of the morning.
The tracking world invites a sense of human interconnectedness to the natural world as a natural response to being immersed in paying attention to the ecosystem. It is a powerful portal in experiencing the truth of our interconnectedness and our oneness.
For those of us who track for pleasure rather than the need to provide food, tracking can be a beautiful opportunity to explore the capacity of the human heart to open to everything and everybody around them.