Signs of Life: Wildlife Tracking Workshop at the Montana Natural History Center

By Sutton R. Stokes, 1-23-08

	Caption: This might be a clue: Elliott hands a student a scrap of fur found on a barbed-wire fence during Saturday's workshop.

Any passersby ducking into the Montana Natural History Center last Saturday at around 11:30 a.m. couldn’t have been blamed for thinking that they had stumbled onto some sort of Twister master class. In the main exhibition room, under the attentive eyes of about a dozen humans and the somewhat glassier eyes of various stuffed and mounted animals — bears, a moose, a wolverine, a bison, etc. — a thin, blond-haired man with a full beard was bent at the waist, both his hands and his feet planted on the small Persian rug that had been spread out as padding on the concrete floor.

This was hour three of the center’s day-long Wildlife Tracking Workshop, led by Elliott Parsons, the man contorting himself on the Persian rug. As his students looked on, Elliott crawled along the rug in slow-motion demonstration of the various gaits at which four-legged mammals move: foot landing behind hand (slow or “understep” walk), foot landing same spot as hand (medium or “direct register” walk), foot landing ahead of hand (fast or “overstep” walk) and so on. As he crawled, he laid down white cards that were printed, Rorschach-like, with stark black animal footprints, and he periodically rose to point out the resulting patterns.

Elliott is a Ph.D. student in wildlife biology at the University of Montana, where (disclosure!) he works on the same project that employs my wife. Though he is not new to teaching tracking, last Saturday was the first time he’d led the Missoula Natural History Center’s tracking course; a repeat is planned for later this winter, date to be announced. Elliott also runs a tracking club that makes monthly excursions. (You might be surprised how many juicy tracks you can find even downtown.)

“I was bitten by the tracking bug about twelve years ago,” said Elliott. This was back when he was an undergraduate at the University of California at Santa Cruz. “I would go to the beach at every available opportunity and study the tracks around the mud puddles.” Haunting the ravines on campus, he even got on nodding terms with a fellow regular, a local bobcat. Elliott’s formal training in tracking includes classes from master tracker (of animals and people) Tom Brown, Jr. and Brown’s protege, Jon Young. He’s also built up quite a library on the subject. “Every time I see a tracking book,” Elliott admitted, “I have to get it.”

Skill at tracking animals fits well with Elliott’s professional interest in wildlife biology, of course, but — as I listened to Elliott talk — I got the idea that this is more of a happy coincidence than a utilitarian acquisition of useful skills. In fact, it seemed to make more sense to look at it the other way around: here is a man who, in his studies, in his avocations and in his professional ambitions, is following his own heartfelt interests and curiosities as far as they will take him.

“Tracking and paying close attention to the natural world has made me healthier and more excited about living,” said Elliott.

Saturday’s course was split between the classroom and a field trip to the Rattlesnake Recreation Area. Though we learned some basic terms and technical concepts (e.g., canine footprints are more symmetrical than feline, etc.), Elliott made clear from the start that this wasn’t going to be a day of diagrams and vocabulary. “I would call this class ‘the mind of the tracker,’” said Elliott. “It’s about getting into the mindset of being as aware as possible.”

Awareness is key, he explained, because tracking is not just about noticing a set of tracks in the first place, but also picking up enough details to identify the animal (harder than you’d think) and puzzle out what it was doing when it left its tracks. (Hence the “gait” lesson described earlier.) “Telling the animal’s story,” Elliott called it — and just as the word story suggests, Elliott sees this process as imaginative, requiring open-mindedness and questions, questions, questions.

To give us a taste of what he was talking about, Elliott asked to brainstorm all the questions we could think of that an animal’s tracks might be able to answer. With his help, we thought of a lot:  Male or female? How long ago did it pass by? Was it lost? What was it doing? Weight? Size? Still alive? Time of day? Full belly? Hungry? Species? How many toe pads? Do its nails show? How did its gait change? If you were going to pet this animal, how high would your hand be? And on and on. It was frustrating to have no idea how to answer these questions yet, but that was just fine with Elliott.

“There is something sinister about answers,” he said.  Quoting one of his teachers, Jon Young, Elliott warned that “once you put a label on something, you’ve stopped learning.”

It might sound as if Elliott were saying that the truth about a set of animal tracks is ultimately unknowable. But really he was just trying to get us thinking like scientists: keep an open mind, don’t assume that the evidence is telling a familiar story, and remain vigilant for the slightest clue that contradicts the conclusions you are starting to draw.  Becoming a good tracker, in other words, is a lifelong process; Saturday was just a beginning.

We wrapped up the morning with some observation exercises out in the snow-covered parking lot, then ate lunch before heading out to the Rattlesnake for our field trip. In the Rattlesnake, we trundled along as a group, with frequent pauses when Elliott or one of the students pointed out a new set of tracks. These were mostly deer and dog tracks, but even a domestic animal’s trail can be interesting, we found, when the goal is not mere identification but also figuring out what exactly the animal had been doing.

For our “final exam,” we closed our eyes and gave Elliott a head start before tracking him back to the parking lot. Again, the challenge wasn’t “identifying” him or even guessing where he was going (at one point, we discovered that he had abandoned his boots in order to alter his tracks, so we knew he couldn’t get far). What was interesting was trying to decide how fast he’d been walking or running at different points, or to spot where he had paused and gone down on one knee to observe us. There really was a “story” to be told.

All of this talk of storytelling and the rigorously open mind necessary to do it well called to mind my own efforts to improve as a writer, and I’m not just reaching for a sew-it-all-together metaphor here. There really does seem to me to be a connection. “You look at the world, but really you just see your own experience,” said Elliott at one point, explaining how difficult it can be to resist reading our own assumptions onto a landscape we are studying. Elliott’s words immediately reminded me of something I once heard the filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker say after a screening: I try to look through my camera the way a cat looks through a window, without an agenda. I grew up believing there was a real dichotomoy between artistic and scientific endeavors and the mindset necessary to accomplish them (guess I overlooked Da Vinci and Michelangelo), but perhaps the gulf does not yawn so wide after all.

As Orwell once said, getting good at seeing “what’s in front of one’s nose” is a life’s work. After Saturday’s class, I understood a little better that his words apply to scribblers and trackers/scientists alike, and I drove home feeling more committed to the effort, indoors and out.

For more like this, check out the rest of the Missoula Notebook.