"As poet Robinson Jeffers has noted, it is the fang that has created the fleet foot of the antelope." Listed below is information about the importance of natural predators for the health of prey animals.

Predator's Fang

The Benefit of Predators

"In general, hunters take animals in the prime of life, while predators disproportionately take out older, younger, or less fit individuals.

Predators can also limit the effects of disease. Diseases like Chronic Wasting Disease found in elk, deer, and moose since infected animals are more vulnerable to predators." ~ by George Wurthner

Chronic Wasting Disease

"Chronic Wasting Disease, otherwise known as (CWD), is a prion disease that affects several cervid species: deer, elk, reindeer, sika deer, and moose. "

CIDRAP  Chronic Wasting Disease Update 2026

How You Can Help

Colorado Parks & Wildlife CWD Video Series

What Hunters Can Do

Mississippi State CWD video series

Butchering Your Kill

How to butcher your kill if you are concerned with Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD)

1. Be alert for deer or elk acting abnormally, or that look sick; report any such animals to agency officials.
2. Wear rubber or latex gloves when you field-dress your animal.
3. In areas reported to have CWD, minimize your contact with a dead deer's brain and spinal cord and wash your hands after contact.
4. Don't eat deer brains or spinal cord.
5. Bone out your deer meat and discard the brain, spinal cord, eyes, spleen, and lymph nodes.
6. If an animal is from a CWD-suspect area, unused parts, especially skull and spine, should be disposed of in an approved landfill or incinerator.
7. "In many parts of the country, the deer population has grown out of control, causing tens of thousands of deer-related car crashes and the destruction of natural habitat."  By Sean Page

Hunting in areas with known CWD

"If you’re hunting in an area with chronic wasting disease, get the animal tested before it ever hits your plate, and don’t eat meat that tests positive." ~Brent Race - High Country News

Predators Help Manage Disease

Manage for and maintain a diverse and healthy Ecosystem, which of course must also include two of nature's historically proven management tools; the Wolf and the Mountain Lion.

The Wolf

Wolves, by design, keep deer and elk populations strong and healthy.

MME's

Mass Mortality Events. What are MME's?

In conclusion

The demands on wildlife are great. With Chronic Wasting Disease spreading across the United States. Predators, by their very nature, are disposed to kill and consume the weak and sick. This process is tens of thousands of years old. It's the original wisdom.

Visual Man Tracking in action: A Search and Rescue Tracker, applying ancient tracking skills, scans the area for clues that show "Spoor," or evidence, of a lost person's trail.

What is Visual Man Tracking?

"Visual Man Tracking" is an ancient hunting technique still in use today for locating and trailing wildlife. But in modern parlance, you will most often find this term related to Tactical and Search and Rescue Mantracking.

What exactly is "Spoor?"

According to Wikipedia, "Spoor is a trace or a set of footprints by which the progress of someone or something may be followed. Spoor may include tracks, scents, or broken foliage."  ~Wikipedia

Tracker

A Tracker uses his eyes to visually locate clues generated by the missing person's movement over the ground. The arrow symbol made of sticks in the photograph is from an actual search. The person who left this clue for searchers had her thinking cap on.

Examples of clues

• Clothing can be snagged on bushes leaving a bit of colored thread along the trail.
• Personal Items: Belongings of lost persons may be accidentally dropped or even left on purpose.
• Sticks and branches: Broken branches or symbols built on the ground show the direction of travel.
• Footprints: The most common evidence a tracker scans for during a search is the lost person's tracks.

Use your natural senses in Visual Man Tracking

Vision is not the only tool used. All our natural human senses are employed in man tracking.

• listening - the missing person calling for help
• smell - perfume - cigarette - campfire smoke
• voice - calling out - yelling
• touch - hot & cold
• vision - seeing spoor

Elements of Visual Man Tracking

1. Spoor recognition & identification
2. aging Spoor - timeline
3. trailing - following Spoor
4. locating subject

Subject's Description and Information

A description of the missing person is vital to searchers. When Spoor is found the Tracker must decipher this information by adding the pieces together, and decide if the Spoor fits the identification elements of the missing person.

"The number one (1) most important element in Visual Man Tracking, is to distinguish Spoor belonging to the subject of interest from Sign that is unrelated.

Aging Spoor

Is Spoor fresh or old? A Visual Man Tracker can differentiate between fresh and old Spoor. Aging spoor means to distinguish Sign that looks promising, from the real thing. But a trained Tracker can tell if a shoe print was laid down minutes, hours, days, weeks, or months before

How to Age Spoor

To understand "Aging Spoor," Trackers study a variety of objects such as twigs, grasses, leaves, and tracks. They spend minutes, hours, and days watching the slow process of change or decay to the Spoor. Using this mental exercise over time, The Visual Man Tracker develops the ability to predict the age of Spoor with confidence.

Example of Aging Spoor

In this example, we are aging the remnants of a dead campfire. The campfire is in the middle of a heavily rocked logging road.

The question is; was the campfire made by our lost person? Did it fit the timeline? How do we know?

Applying the Skills of a Visual Tracker

• Is there a strong smell of wood smoke in the air?
• Are the ashes, charcoal, and burned sticks still warm to the touch?
• Do we see the subject's fresh prints in and around the fire area?

If we answer Yes to these questions; we can then answer the important question with surety. Yes, the campfire fits the missing person's timeline.

Aging factors

Weather has a profound effect on Spoor. Sunlight bleaches color, wind can distort, and rain washes the track away. As Spoor ages, Sign recognition becomes more difficult.

Going Deep into Aging Sign

Using our campfire example, let's assume the campfire was cold. The ashes, charcoal, and sticks are cold to the touch. If there were shoe tracks in the ash, the rain had long since washed them away. However, we can still smell the faint scent of wood smoke in the air. The smell is subtle. But it's there. And if we look closely at the burned wood in the campfire, we determine through aging techniques, that the sticks have been freshly gathered.

A close inspection and aging of the abandoned fire proved the fire to be out. The Spoor fell within the timeline of the missing person. The conclusion? The campfire is Spoor from our lost person.

Trailing Spoor

Visual Man Tracking is following, or "Trailing" clues left behind by the person's passage. The Spoor trail can be a single clue such as our campfire example, or a variety of Sign.

Spoor such as footprints, clothing, broken twigs, pushed-down grasses, a beer can, or in the case of a smoker, a freshly discarded cigarette butt, can be a clear Sign. In the best tracking circumstances, Spoor is easily found and available. But the reality is the opposite. Trailing is a mix of clues and nothing found. Human tracks disappear under grasses or are removed by weather. Often, the hard compacted ground makes it difficult to impossible for trailing

Trailing on Difficult Terrain

Gravel roads and rocky terrain are especially difficult for Trailing. Some soils, such as compacted clay washed by rain, are examples of difficult substrates to trail. In the photo below, the Man Tracker recognizes the Cedar branchlet as a Spoor left by the lost person. The Visual Tracker can recognize Spoor deliberately placed.

Locating the Missing Subject

There are many variables to locating a lost hiker. Valuable information is needed to begin an earnest search in the correct area. Where was the person last seen (PLS)? Did they leave a note indicating where they have gone hiking? Who saw them last? Were they alone or with someone else?

The questions are many and getting the right answers are key in locating the missing person. By recognizing Spoor and Sign, the skilled Visual Man Tracker has a good chance of locating the missing subject.

In Conclusion

Tracking can be explained as interpreting human (or animal) presence and passage upon the landscape. The terms: Visual Man Tracking, Man Tracking, Trailing, and Spoor. Encompass all of the elements of ancient tracking skills but are most often used in more formal settings such as in Search and Rescue operations or by military tactical teams.

Successfully finding a lost person takes training. It takes time, hands-on practice, and dedication to become proficient in the skills required. Visual Man Tracking is rewarding.

Our tracking classes highly benefit SAR members who wish to increase their teams' ground tracking ability.

If you can imagine actually finding a lost person, whose best hope lies in the success of your skills along with other dedicated Trackers, Lifesong Wilderness Survival welcomes you to dive in, thrive, and master your tracking and survival skills.

Begin with First Circle Camp.

Tracking is a fun way to discover and learn about animals and their behavior. The more you track Animals the more you will learn about them and the life they live. Learning how to Track is an ancient survival skill and the skill our ancestors relied upon to live, hunt, and forage.

How to track animals

As we learn to Track we discover Sign and movement of wildlife. Recently our Oregon students mapped out coyote, gray fox, feral cat, birds, chipmunk, mouse, and bobcat.

The discovery of wildlife is made easier through the skills of Tracking.

Tracking is Science and Art

Tracking is precise. The science of Animal Tracking require measurements to distinguish between animal tracks of the same family. As an example the Dog family Canidae, measuring the width and length of a track correctly tells us if the animal is a Fox or Coyote.

Tools to measure and document tracks in the field

Tools are helpful in measuring and documenting an animal's print, stride, and trail width for identification.

• ruler
• tape measure
• notebook
• pencil & eraser
• scotch tape (For collecting animal hair)
• camera

Animal sign

Animals leave Sign as they live and pass over the landscape. Developing recognition of an animal's presence on the landscape reflects our ability to learn the meaning of these terms.

• scrapes
• scratches
• rubs
• digs
• hair
• scat
• trail
• gnawing's

A bus driver and hunter

One of our new students is a bus driver and avid deer hunter from Eugene, Oregon. John had this to say about his newly developed tracking skills.

"Thank you, Mark, for a wonderful experience. I learned more about tracking in 2 days than I have in 40 plus years of hunting."  ~John Hampton

Thanks, John., We love to hear comments from our students. At Lifesong Wilderness Adventures our focus is to increase student's Tracking Skills, dramatically.

Survival skills

Tracking helps us discover the animals that visit our backyard and neighborhood and still is a valuable skill for hunters, photographers, and nature enthusiasts. As for me, I believe learning how to Track is one of the best survival skills a person can learn.

Learn to Track Wildlife

Are you ready to be a Tracker? Register for our Oregon Intro and Advanced Animal Tracking.

Recommended books and posts on learning to track animals

• Tom Brown's Field Guide to Nature Observation and Tracking by Tom Brown
• Tracking and the Art of Seeing by Paul Rezendes
• Sign language - reading natures clues with Mark Wienert