Tuesday, June 8, 2010

Western Tracking Institute Tracking Class

 

1 I spent last Saturday at an animal tracking class provided by the Western Tracking Institute. The instructors Rick, Lee and William were top notch and we were able to learn a lot about gaits and animal identification.  2 You have no idea how many ways a rabbit track can present itself. Our Tracking location was very interesting. We spent all day under the 805 and 56 merge underpasses and bridges. The first part of the day was spent under the big overpasses. The underpasses were a great place to see many different types of tracks. The substrate was very soft in places and that allowed us to analyze the gaits and tracks fairly easily. We saw raccoon, skunk, bobcat, deer, opossum and the ever present cottontail tracks.  3  4 The second part of the day was spent under the bridge in the muck. Luckily I brought a pair of rubber boots to keep all of the mud and water at bay. We found some really interesting tracks under the bridge including crawfish, deer, bobcat, a ton of raccoon tracks and a mystery track that no one could identify. In all it was a fun day of tracking even if you could barely hear each other talking over all of the traffic noise. I'm looking forward to the trailing workshop later on this summer and hope to get through the entire curriculum. In all it was a great experience and I highly reccommend taking any of the classses offered by the WTI.

 

Posted via web from Ian's posterous

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