| Main Feature Story - Friday, February 5, 2010
Going Green: The other side of the tracks
Marin Tracking Club can make quite an impression
by Joy Lanzendorfer
In Point Reyes last week, a single patch of mud showed tracks of birds, insects, rodents, possibly a kangaroo rat, coyotes, skunks and a barefooted human. I know this because I went animal tracking with the Marin County Tracking Club, which meets once a month to look at the signs animals leave behind.
The founder of the club is Richard Vacha, a lifelong tracker in the manner of the Apache Indians. He and three other leaders take a group of 20 to 25 people tracking on the last Sunday of every month.
The club has been going strong for three years now. Although they cancel if it's raining hard, meetings still happen in light rain—in fact, in some ways, a little moisture can be good.
"The rain dampens the sand and shows really precise details," Vacha says. "In the summer, during the time of dry sand, the wind comes up and blows sand all over the place. You can't see fine details that way."
The morning I went tracking was foggy, but by the time we all drove to Abbotts Lagoon in Pt. Reyes, the sun had come out and it was becoming a beautiful day. Abbotts Lagoon is a good tracking spot because of all the animal activity. If the animals want to drink fresh water from the stream or cross to the beach, they have to come down to the path. On top of that, the sand makes their tracks easily visible.
We hiked to the beach and formed a circle where we introduced ourselves and learned that we would see three tracking sites—called stations—of interest. But first our leader Melissa said she wanted to help us become more aware of our senses. She took us through an exercise I remember from high school drama class, where we shut our eyes and listened to the sounds around us.
"What is the loudest sound you hear?" Melissa said. "What is the softest sound you hear?"
Questions are important in tracking club—they even call them sacred—and are thought to lead to deeper understanding. There aren't definitive answers to most of the questions. You are supposed to ask, but you may not get any information...even if your leader has an answer. Take our first station, which was the mud patch mentioned above. Vacha said it one of the best examples he had ever seen. It looked like an abstract painting with tracks of different sizes and shapes going in all directions. You could see the impression of fur between pads, the texture of the skin on toes, the delicate bone structure of rodent feet and the tiny lines of insect trails. Some animals had slipped in the mud, others had sand from the beach on their feet, and one barefooted person had stepped in the puddle, and then, presumably, back on the grassy bank.
The centerpiece of all this was one animal—or was it two?—that had walked through the mud. It was a four-legged animal with claws, we determined, and it had thumped confidently across the path without stopping. Beside its tracks were similar, but smaller, strides that seemed to have happened at the same time.
Or maybe not.
"What kind of animal would do this?" Vacha asked.
"A raccoon?" someone ventured.
"What do you think?" Vacha asked. "And look at this other animal with similar paws. Could it be a baby walking alongside?"
(For some reason, the identity of this animal was a secret. Some people, like Vacha, knew what it was, but those of us who didn't know were supposed to figure it out, and then—lest we ruin it for the others—keep the information to ourselves. Luckily, someone slipped up and I learned that it was a skunk.)
However, there's something to be said for using observation and deductive reasoning. The second station was on the sand dunes. A four-legged animal had left distinct paw prints by the stream. This time, Melissa took us through the questions: How many legs does the animal have? What are the paws shaped like? Which are the front legs and which are the back?
"Are those claws?" someone asked.
"I don't know, are they?" Melissa responded.
Whatever it was, the animal ran up on the dune and joined several others of its kind in what appeared to be some kind of party. We examined the tracks, establishing that the animals had rolled, dug and run around on the dune.
Then we turned our attention to the scat.
You haven't lived until you see a group of adults eagerly waiting their turn to smell animal poop. Of course, scat is an important part of tracking because it shows what the animal eats. In this case, the scat was full of shells and fish scales. Someone said he thought the animals were river otters.
And suddenly, a picture emerged in my mind. I could see the otters climbing out of the water, running and playing in the sand, and finally—and yes, there were the tracks to prove it—sliding back into the lagoon. It all added up.
At the third station, we climbed a deer trail over a ridge and investigated more scat. By the combination of bird feathers and animal fur, we determined that it was from a bobcat claiming its territory. And on a ledge, there was a mystery that, unlike the skunk prints, no one seemed to know the answer to: Why were there three scats on one little ledge? Were there two birds and a rodent pooping there? Or was the third blob vomit, not scat? Either way, why had the birds or rodent chosen that particular spot?
At 12:30pm, four hours after we started, we convened on the beach and shared what we had learned. Apparently, I had lucked out for my first tracking trip. Between the mud patch and the otter party, the tracking conditions were some of the best they had ever seen.
While I would have benefited from less dependence on my own meager tracking skills during the hike, on the way back to the car I seemed more inclined to notice the details around me. I didn't just watch a bird skip across the path, I looked at how its leg was attached to its body. This, I suppose, is the increased sensitivity Vacha meant when he said tracking makes you more aware of nature and your presence in it.
"Tracking is about bringing the world to light," Vacha had told me. "It's about reanimating the world so that we're not just blind tourists out on a hike, moving fast through it, loving it all and thinking it's beautiful, but not really knowing what's going on there. You move slowly and quietly so that you're not chasing everything away. Otherwise, the only view of the animal you're going to see is its rear as it's running away from you."
Track Joy down at joy@greenfly.net.
The Marin Tracking Club meets the last Sunday of each month at 8:30am, rain or shine, at Toby's Feed Barn on Highway 1 in Pt. Reyes Station. For info, call 707/663-1704 or check out www.regenerativedesign.org . | 
Send this story
Print this story
