The natural world and its amazing wealth of wildlife is one of the great treasures of our planet. But wherever we may live, it’s easy to miss the full richness of the wildlife around us, unless we know where to look and what to look for.
Here is where the skill of wildlife tracking offers an extraordinary window into our natural environments. Wildlife tracking, encompassing many areas of knowledge, is the practiced facility of identifying and following the tracks, trails, and other evidence of animal life we find in woods, deserts, rivers, lakes, mountains, plains, and in our own back yards.
In these 24 practical, hands-on episodes, you’ll travel into the wonders of the natural world, as you build skill with essential elements of tracking, such as:
- Identifying and interpreting animal tracks;
- Tracking the amazing world of birds;
- Learning the potent language of animal marking;
- Going invisible and recalibrating your senses;
- Looking for bedding, nesting, and mating in the wild; and
- Learning the art of trailing.
Your guide, Casey McFarland of CyberTracker Conservation, is a senior professional tracker, teacher of wildlife guides, and a passionate advocate of wilderness and the magnificent spectrum of life that awaits you there.
Throughout these richly informative episodes, Casey illustrates the principles and methods of tracking through demonstrations and engrossing stories of tracking in the field. Through these encounters, and your new skills, you’ll experience how tracking takes us vividly into the lives of the animals we follow, as they lead us to where they feed, and where they bed, hunt, mate, and raise their young—revealing how they see the world and offering us a perspective other than our own.
In Nature Watching: How to Find and Observe Wildlife, you’ll encounter the stunning beauty and diversity of our planet, its wild creatures, and its rich ecosystems, as you discover a different and richly rewarding way of knowing the world.