Developing a sense for how things age in nature is key to becoming a tracker. That sense is both instinctive and something we can cultivate to a highly refined degree. We must always ask: When was that track or trail made? Is it fresh? Is the animal who made it nearby? How often does the animal pass by here, and when did it last pass? When were those shrubs nibbled, that scat placed? What do these signs tell us about larger patterns over time?
We confront these questions the moment we start paying attention to our surroundings. The key to the answers lies in some remarkably simple practices, ones that lead us directly into the natural state of wonder that defines a hunter-gatherer: constant curiosity.
To start the journey toward understanding the world of aging, find a patch of soil, sand or mud—or best, some of each. It should be somewhere you pass through every day, and a place that is exposed to weather. Take a stick and press it into that patch. You’ve just made a track!
Now, every time you walk past it, take a close look. Photograph it if you’d like, or, to accelerate your awareness, draw it. Watch it over a period of days and weeks. Make new marks alongside it daily if you’d like, so you eventually have a row of comparative marks. You might keep a simple log of the daily weather patterns during your experiment, along with remarks about what you observe. You could also try using sticks of different sizes and shapes to make your marks.
And as long as you’ve gone this far, find a shrub or tree nearby that you don’t mind pruning a little. Clip one branch tip off, and break another. Now you have a feeding mark. Finally, press one of your track-sticks into some fresh green grass and begin observing how the damaged grass blades bruise and weather.
By observing how these marks and signs change over time, you will quickly establish a baseline sense of aging. Do this consistently, in varying weather and through the seasons. Test different locations, one protected and shaded and one exposed and sunny. Try different types of ground and different shrubs and trees. You will begin to see how precisely you can read the aging process and how much it reveals about recent weather history and animal activity.
A more advanced controlled experiment can be done by building a tracking box, a simple frame of 2x6s or 2x8s. Fill your box with damp sand, level and smooth it, and walk across it the same way every day, leaving a series of trails next to each other. After a few days, and through cycles of different weather, you can directly observe and compare the effects of time on the tracks.
Whenever you go out and find tracks, press your thumb or fingers into the ground alongside them. You have an instant time comparison—now versus then. Since substrates are infinitely variable and complex, this gives you a way to assess the nature of this particular spot, its hardness or softness, its dampness or dryness, its ability to hold detail. At any point on an animal’s trail, the ground will be different, so the only way to truly understand how a particular track has aged is to test that spot and get a feel for its nature and how it weathers.
The truly wondrous result of this study is how it brings a palpable sense of time into nature observation. Any substrate has a history of animal activity etched into its surface and stretching far back into the past. A beach, a riverbank, a muddy stretch of trail—every spot that accumulates tracks will show you a range from very old, rounded, obscure patterns to sharp-edged, pristine, fresh tracks.
The world of nature is full of history. Animals are living out their lives over time, and every aspect of the landscape—indeed, the earth itself—is in a continually dynamic process of change. Everywhere we turn, the earth is telling us its story. We are in the middle of a four-dimensional puzzle that stretches back and reaches forward. How amazing to see into the past and the future, and to realize where we are in the present matrix.
The substrates themselves are changing and aging under the influences of weather—hot and dry days, fog, wind, rain and tides. Everything that happens leaves its mark. When a deer walks across a leafy forest floor, those leaves are in a particular state of aging depending on the time of year and weather. In a spectrum of substrate conditions from damp to dry, deer hooves can either bend the leaves or crack and break them, giving us an accurate gauge of when it passed. If the leaves are crispy dry but the hooves only bent them, the animal passed by when the leaves were damper, and vice versa. With practice, the gradations become clear.
A coyote crossing sand in the early evening after a dry day will leave nothing but loose craters for tracks. But on its return just before dawn, after fog has rolled in and blanketed the land, its tracks in the dampened sand will be sharp and clear. A day or two later, those same tracks will show a marked amount of aging with entirely different characteristics, as the sharp edges wear down.
Sand, dust or debris that has fallen or blown into a track can be a reliable age and weather indicator. Crusts can reveal a complex history of dampening and drying. Something as basic as a blade of grass, crushed by a sharp hoof-edge, gives us a timing spectrum from fresh bruises to dried-out and frayed edges that can precisely indicate when the animal passed by. This is the kind of sign that is critical in trailing an animal and learning its habits. Picking up such signs and staying on them can lead you to the animal you are trailing, but before you go in and disturb it, or push it ahead of you too much, always ask yourself, “Do I really need to bother this animal?” “Will bothering it actually endanger it?” “Have I already learned enough?” Sometimes to build a sense of connection with wild animals it can be best to back off a little.
Most scats have predictable aging processes. Bobcat scat is a good example. When very fresh, it has a shiny mucous coating over a very black scat. As it ages, this black, shiny surface lightens in color until it becomes white. In a hot location with direct sun, this can happen in a few days. In a cool, shaded location, it could take weeks. In the meantime, while the scat ages, various insects will lay eggs in it that hatch and leave their own signs and structures. It is all in a constant state of dynamic evolution over time. Time leaves its tracks.
Chews, rubs and scratches on twigs and bark undergo a universal process of aging. In a thicket inhabited by woodrats, the ends of twigs show a range of ages, from fresh, bright tooth gouges to old, grey marks stretching back for years. Deer antler rubs, bobcat claw scratches and squirrel chew marks on tree bark clearly reveal differences in age. From repeated use by the animals, these kinds of marks can build up many years of historical marking.
Richard Vacha is a Point Reyes Station resident and the founder of the Point Reyes Tracking School and the Marin Tracking Club.