Blog Stew: You Are Tracking It

• Watch the video trailer for a class on animal trailing and tracking taught by Casey McFarland,  "but also, by extension, appreciating our connection to the natural world and how to view it more discerningly."

At the website, select "Nature Watching: How to Find and Observe Wildlife." and click the "Start Free Trial" button. See what you think.

• This small fact has been in the news of late. I read it at The Hill in February: Plastics recycling is a bigger scam than 'cigarettes are good for you.' Coincidentally, the reccyling facility that I used went from "accepting plastic" to "separate no. 1 and no. 2 plastics" to "sorry, no plastic accepted."

• After her angler husband died, Dylan Demery of Fort Collins wanted to take up fly-fishing herself.

Then she ran into the fly fishing-bros at the typical fly shop, who would ask her if she was buying something for her husband, if they waited on her at all.

Frustrated, she started her own women's gear line and fishing school, as described The Colorado Sun. 

Fishing wasn’t going to lose her. Ranalla became hooked — heh — after fishing helped her as much physically as mentally: fly casting helped her rehabilitate from an injury when nothing else worked. She was willing to wear waders that fit her poorly because she loved the sport. There aren’t many like her. Not even her daughter, in fact, was willing, and that’s what drove Ranalla to change the industry. Her daughter is tall, 5’11, and shaped like a woman. 

“I wanted my daughter to go into the water with me,” Ranalla said. “I bought the best thing I could find. It was lame. I knew she would never get in the water with it.”

What Every Trapper Needs, or Not

When I started camera-trapping for omivores like bears or foxes, I tried baiting them with dry cat or dog food. I figured it would not hurt anyone who ate a few kibbles. Camera-trapper Chris Wemmer, who has just written a book on the topic, said he used punctured tuna cans in rock piles and such places to intrigue certain animals and make them pause to get their pictures taken.

As I read the regs, hunting over bait is illegal, but camera-trapping is not. Nevertheless, I quit using the kibbles after a neighbor's far-ranging dog showed up at one of my sites on an obscure game trail — and then kept coming back. 

I decided to switch to scent lures and went looking online, which led me to F&T Fur Harvester's Trading Post (physically located in Alpina, Mich.) where I ordered such items as "Dunlap's War Paint Lure,"  "Dabbins' All-Call Lure," and some others.

When nothing's happening, play cards with
a deck of famous Walker hounds.

They arrived, "packed by Gabbie" and "checked by Don? Den?" — well, whoever, it was all fine.  They included a copy of their paper catalog—130 pages of everything needed by fur trappers, hound hunters, predator callers, dog trainers, and people who want to wear fantasy-mountain man-style fur hats.

The feeling when you think you might know a tiny bit about something, and then you open the door — and it's a universe! All I trap are the field mice that make it past the gray foxes and into the house, and I have a neighbor who goes out with the houndsmen after mountain lions. So this was eye-opening.

Pages and pages of traps, trap parts, trap accessories, books and DVDs, fur-processing tools, dog gear, coon-hunters' clothing, and don't forget your working apron and skull-bleaching kit. 

Not just scent lures, but ingredients to make your own: "Cheese Essence Oil: Gives off a powerful blue cheese odor that is excellent for canines."

There were high-end headlamps, sort of like the old ones with the case of four D cells that rode on your belt with the cord going up under your jacket in back to the lamp on your cap or hard hat. 

Today these have lasers and multiple LED lights and rechargeable batteries. Not cheap — $200 and up! Still, tempting.

Hang around the fishing-lures department in any outdoor sports emporium, and someone will say, "Most lures are designed to catch anglers, not fish." 

That passes for wisdom. But there is truth in it. Does the bass really respond to a perfect photographic replica of baitfish scales? Or does it just look good to the customer?

I was leafing through F&T's "Set-Making Equipment and Supplies" pages (shovels, trowels, sifters, pan covers, etc.) when I saw "Track Makers."

That is the photo up top. It's a molded paw of a coyote, fox, or bobcat, $6.95 each, which the trapper may press into the carefully sifted soil around the waiting trap.

Now I have to say, after carefully hiding human scent and deploying animal-attracting scent and maybe even placing a visual decoy that moves like an injured bird or something, are little paw prints going to make a difference in persuading Mr. Fox to take one step more? 

Smells matter, sounds matter, prey movement matters, but would a predator say to itself, "I ain't going there. I don't see any footprints"?

They might be useful if you want to teach a tracking class though.

A Lesson from a Veteran Tracker

I never got a chance to learn animal tracking from some near-mythical Apache who could track a mouse across slickrock. But a couple of weeks ago I had another kind of tracking lesson.

Some of us volunteer firefighters  were called to a motorcycle wreck just inside the county line, but when we rolled up, there was no rider, no ambulance, just a couple of Colorado State Patrol troopers walking up and down beside the highway. There was nothing for us to do, but you always stop to make small talk anyway.

According to the CSP troopers, someone—the victim's riding buddy, I think—had called it in, and an ambulance came and picked him up before law enforcement was notified. Just one of those weird Dispatch things. 

(Maybe the call went to the larger adjacent county's dispatch center. Just because you call 911 does not mean you get the right jurisdiction.)

So what you do in these cases is stroll around and try to figure how this Suzuki C90 "Boulevard" came to be upside-down amidst spring wildflowers.

Someone pointed out narrow tire marks on the asphalt that veered toward the edge. Was that where he had gone off? Then a sheriff's deputy arrived, and the troopers treated him deferentially. Why? Because he was a senior CSP sergeant who had recently retired and—to fill his days and supplement his state pension—had gone to work as a county deputy.

(He is not the first. It's a good deal for the sheriff: for a small-county deputy's salary, he gets an experienced officer who is not yet ready to hang up his handcuffs.)

He was the "Apache tracker." He looked at the rubber skid mark and quickly dismissed it as an unrelated track left by (probably) a light trailer with a flat tire: "See how the mark is darker on the edges than in the middle?"

A few steps more and he pointed down—here was the motorcycle's track in the gravel, he said, estimating that the rider had come up a hill and gone almost—but not quite—around a curve at considerably above the 65 mph speed limit.

I bent down and looked. Oh yeah, and there farther on were flat drag marks on either side, left by the rider's boots as he struggled to keep control. It was all clear—or at least clear-er. 

Then the small shallow ditch and the tall grass had taken charge, rolling the Suzuki and tearing off various small parts. Apparently the rider survived.

It's always interesting to watch a master craftsman at work.