Six arts or disciplines of tracking:
1. Track identification - Who made the track?
2. Track interpretation - What happened here?
3. Trailing - Where was this animal or subject going?
4. Track aging - When was this track made?
5. Ecological or environmental tracking - Why is the animal or subject here?
6. Spirit track - How was that animal or subject feeling?
Reading the last five arts:
To get the sense of the subject's mindset, motivation, and intent, it's important to have a solid foundation in the previous five arts. This allows for inferences about how the subject was feeling, what they were thinking, or where they might be now.
Important concepts when studying the six disciplines of tracking:
1. The sequence in which these disciplines are presented helps build overall tracking abilities.
2. Learning track features unique to each species, such as track measurements, trail widths, track patterns, pace, scat, hair sign, and behaviors, is crucial for identifying the subjects that left the disturbance.
Interpreting track patterns and signs:
Being able to interpret pressure releases, track patterns, and signs, such as incidental and accidental ruffs, helps with the difficult discipline of trailing. Understanding the subject's behaviors, needs, motivation, and being able to interpret their track and sign for speed, direction of travel, and changes in direction make it easier to stay on their trail.
Track aging:
Aging considers all of the previously mentioned disciplines and includes factors like wind changes, direct sunlight, temperature, dew, and rain events. Keeping a weather journal and paying attention to the three primary track aging zones (horizon cut, wall cut, and floor cut) can accelerate accuracy in track aging.
Ecological or environmental tracking:
This discipline deals with understanding why the subject is in a specific spot at a specific time. Factors like seasons, time of day, temperature, weather, food availability, predatory pressures, and population pressures play a significant role. Most subjects in a given area have survival needs, which include shelter, water, and food. Human subjects may also seek fire or warmth. Trees can indicate the presence of certain wildlife species in their understory, providing shelter, water, or food.
Learning about each tree and its significance can help determine the wildlife species present in the area.Species in your area prefer moisture content and acidity. Then explore the understory herbaceous plants and shrubs. Guaranteed, you'll find trails, runs, rubs, scrapes, and scat.
Take an inventory of these things and also know the diet and preferences of the animals that you're tracking. Human beings, when lost for instance, rarely travel uphill. They seem to gravitate to openings like lake shores and streams. Knowing this aspect of environmental tracking can help aid you in the search and rescue effort.
The last part, the how this art is reserved, people who had plenty of dirt time and the other five disciplines of tracking. The discipline of how the animal was feeling is based on educated conjecture. You need a mountain of verifiable and reproducible evidence and results before you can jump to conclusions. These conclusions, however, can be surprisingly accurate. Again, that accuracy is completely dependent on how solid your foundation is in the other five directions or disciplines of tracking.
It is much like watching an American sitcom and being able to tell how the entire plot is going to unfold within the first five minutes. Those of you who have been TV junkies know exactly what I'm talking about. You know the storyline and how it will resolve itself before the first commercial break. In the same way, you can get on a track and knowing the animal's environment, behavior, the age of the tracks in the context of the scenes, the larders, the pushes and pulls of predators and prey, and mating pressure. You can predict with about eighty percent accuracy if tracking is solid where that animal is, its emotional state, what it is tending to do as you follow its trail, even at the time it is doing it ahead of you on that trail, and much more.
If you're not familiar with seeing tracks and leaf litter, if you haven't practiced on your belly looking at dusk impressions trying to find a mouse-over easement, then you're not going to see, let alone interpret the tracks and their features. In order to get to that level, people who immediately jump into spirit tracking and then enter a scene where there might be a lost person do the entire acting community a disservice. Just hang that out there as a possibility, something may be to aim for with your proficiency in the five skills.
At Maine Primitive Skills School, individuals discover a haven dedicated to the exploration of survival techniques, primitive skills, and nature education.
#Tracking
#Survival
#Wilderness
#Trailing
#Animalbehavior
#Trackinterpretation
#Ecological
#Wilderness
#Survival
