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Wary wild things stay out of sight, but leave us notes, written in a language we can read

By Vicki Croke, Globe Staff, 05/27/2000

"On the river ice, most of the snow had been taken by the wind, and the pugmarks were crisp, as if incised in steel. In one place, the tigress had lain down and stretched, leaving behind a ghostly outline even to the big head and long tail, the leg crook, the big floppy paws. All that was missing was the stripes."

The tracks animals leave behind tell a story - not always this exotic, but always evocative. The great nature writer Peter Matthiessen wrote those lines in his book "Tigers in the Snow," and naturalists around here say a simple walk in thewoods or even your own backyard will provide you with volumes of information, if you know how to read them.

Wild animals are by nature elusive, but they leave signs of their lives everywhere - in tracks, broken twigs, gnawed or clipped branches, excavated dirt, and especially their droppings.

Sleuthing through these signals is an ancient art and a modern science. It is an endeavor that can ground us in the natural world. But you can't just bone up on it in a book. You need to get outside and immerse yourself in what the "Peterson Field Guides: Animal Tracks" calls "the little stories from wild country."

It is a perfect description. After all, before language evolved, what did we read? Paleontologist Martin Lockley, author of "The Eternal Trail: A Tracker Looks at Evolution," says it was tracks, of course. Even today, children of the Bushmen of the Kalahari can distinguish their mother's footprints in the sand from all others.

Closer to home, the art hasn't been lost, either.

"It's easier than birdwatching," says Dr. Greg Mertz, director of the New England Wildlife Center in Hingham. "Once you've found a track, it won't fly away on you."

On city sidewalks, all summer, you'll see the sticky trails of slugs as they crisscross the pavement. In your front lawn, divots of overturned grass mean that skunks have been grub hunting. In wooded areas in the suburbs around Boston, you're likely to see the whitish pellets or casts of owls littered around certain trees. These pellets are worlds unto themselves. They are regurgitated, undigested parts of the owl's prey. Breaking them apart, you can find bits of mouse skulls, and ribs, and long bones. You could almost rebuild a mouse skeleton from what you find in a single cast.

And then there are the tracks.

For us beginners, it's easiest to find clear footprints of animals in mud after a rainshower, or in the moist earth along ponds and rivers, or in snow.

Here we can see the distinctive tracks of rabbits - the small front feet close together and the longer, larger hind prints farther apart. We can imagine the hop it takes to make them. There are the handlike prints of the opossum and raccoon, the flat, round prints of porcupines, and the elegant, almost pear-shaped hoof marks of white-tail deer.

But experienced trackers can see so much more. They notice the outline of footprints in leaf litter, gravel, even hard rock. And furthermore, they can read between the lines.

Master tracker Tom Brown Jr. was at the Museum of Science this week as part of the opening of the new "Natural Mysteries" exhibit, which can give your tracking career a head start. With many animal tracks, Brown says, he knows "who made them, whether it was male or female, dominant left or right, was its belly full or empty."

If you don't believe him, Brown, who teaches seminars in New Jersey on tracking and has written several books on the subject, recommends a simple experiment. Walk down a beach or any area that will hold a good track mark. Stroll along for a few feet. Then drink a couple of glasses of water and make a new set of tracks right next to the old one. "You'll see the difference yourself," Brown says. The inside edge of the footprint "will be pressed in deeper if you have food or water in your belly."

Just that morning, Brown says, he spotted loads of raccoon tracks in empty lots on his way from his hotel to the museum. It's easy, he says, "if you know the little secrets."

A few of those secrets are outlined in the museum's new exhibit. In one diorama of rabbits, we learn: "If the snipped twigs look like they were cut with pruning shears close to the ground, they were eaten by rabbits and hares. If the . . . nipped twig is higher from the ground and looks fibrous and torn, deer have been browsing here. Old cuts are black while fresh ones are tan in color."

To uncover traces of chipmunks, "look for piles of shelled seeds and pine cone bits. Squirrels leave larger middens of food remains."

At night, if you aim a flashlight into the woods and eyes are looking back at you, you'll know they belong to a fox if they shine a green/white. If they reflect yellow/green, it's a raccoon; white, it's a spider; and gold, an American toad.

The most important thing to do, according to Brown, is get your knees dirty. The only way to learn about tracking is to go outside and get up close to the actual tracks. It takes time to find them, follow them, and puzzle through what they mean.

Looking for mouse footprints in mud or breaking apart skunk droppings may sound as earthy as you can get. But tracking is a journey that all the experts talk about in a mystical way.

Brown learned about nature from his friend's grandfather, an Apache named Stalking Wolf. And paleontologist Lockley points out the power we still invest in prints. Consider how many fans, Lockley says in "The Eternal Trail," travel great distances to slip their feet into the prints their favorite stars have left on that famous Hollywood sidewalk. It makes them feel connected.

"Footprints have great meaning," Lockley writes. "Each is the energetic signature of the species and consciousness that made it."

This story ran on page F01 of the Boston Globe on 5/27/2000.
© Copyright 2000 Globe Newspaper Company.