Mammal Tracks & Sign is undoubtedly the most thorough treatment of tracks and tracking ever published. This guide brings together clear track and trail illustrations, range maps, and full-color photographs showing feeding signs, scat, tunnels, burrows, bedding areas, remains, and more, to give a wealth of information about hundreds of mammal species living in North America. The book teaches you how to find, identify, measure, and interpret the clues mammals leave behind. Included are essays about the developing science of tracking, along with instructive anecdotes from the author's work as a tracker and wildlife expert.

      The scope of this book is truly astonishing, with nearly 800 pages and more than a thousand vivid color photos, plus sketches, range maps, and diagrams of gaits. The tutorial on gaits is particularly revealing, using stop-motion style illustrations to show how an animal leaves each pattern of tracks on the ground. Size descriptions are included in both English and metric units. Mammal Tracks & Sign includes detailed track and trail data for 135 species, with actual-size track illustrations in one section, plus an excellent section of scat photos.

      Although a bit hefty, Mammal Tracks & Sign is a must for hikers--from beginning naturalists to professional trackers--who want to know what they are seeing on the trail. There's too much information in this book to leave it behind! It is also great reading for those dark winter evenings when you want to be home by the fire. Winner of the 2003 National Outdoor Book Award. Stackpole Books. ISBN: 0-8117-2626-6. 779 Pages. 2003.

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Bird Tracks & Sign
A Guide to North American Species
by Mark Elbroch, Eleanor Marks, and C. Diane Boretos

      Bird Tracks & Sign is a one-of-a-kind and greatly needed book. Most other tracking books are oriented almost exclusively towards mammals, with little or no coverage of birds. But Elbroch's book filled the void, and it isn't just a book to identify bird tracks--this is a virtual encyclopedia of bird tracks, droppings, pellets, cavity holes, feeding signs, roosts, nests, and feather identification!

      Whether your background is as a birder, or as a tracker, or as a wanna-be naturalist, Bird Tracks & Sign will take your outdoor adventures to a whole new level. This book will give you new eyes to see the natural world--helping you to interpret bird tracks you find in the snow or mud, or bird tracks surrounding a picked-over carcass. You may even find a bird carcass picked over by something else, or maybe a roosting site, bird droppings or a skull. Whatever you find--even a single feather-- it is a clue to a story, and Elbroch's book is the key to reading that story. No other book like it has ever been written.

      Bird Tracks & Sign is organized with sections on tracks, droppings, feeding signs, and feathers, meaning that you can use the information you have to identify the bird that left it, rather than having to know the bird to look up the associated tracks and signs. A handy reference chart inside the front and back covers of the book helps with speedy track identification. Bird Tracks & Sign is easy and fun to use, and it will help anyone learn more about birds. Stackpole Books. ISBN: 0-8117-2696-7. 456 Pages. 2001.

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Animal Skulls
A Guide to North American Species
by Mark Elbroch

      Mark Elbroch has done it again! Taking a subject matter that is seriously under-represented in the literature, he has produced a tome that is more than simply "better" than anything else on the market; it is entirely encyclopedic in scope, with more than 700 pages detailing the skulls of 275 North American mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians. Animal Skulls includes hundreds of photos and exacting illustrations, plus tables of measurements to help you identify skulls with precision and confidence.

      Elbroch's book is a welcome resource to me. As a teenager I occasionally brought skulls to the university to compare them with others in a display cabinet. But it was never convenient to do so, and I am far more busy now as an adult. Some skulls I have identified with the aid of other bones on hand, or purely through process of elimination when there were few choices to confuse them with, but other skulls became unsolved mysteries when I lacked the necessary resources or time to explore them further. Now, with the aid of Elbroch's book, I am thrilled to identify with certainty several mysterious skulls that have sat in my office for years.

      Animal Skulls is technical in its detail, with lots of measurements, tables, and many new words for the lay person, but it is formatted well, and easy to grasp the fundamentals quickly. In my first pass, I made educated guesses, then checked those species in the book to either confirm or refute my hypothesis. If wrong, I simply guessed again. In other words, if the technical jargon seems daunting, at least you can get started without it and pick it up as you go.

      There is nothing I hate more than walking away from a mystery, and now, with the aid of Animal Skulls I won't have to. Having Elbroch's book at my finger tips is like having the university display case right in my own house!

      In addition to skull identification, Elbroch provides some basic forensic training, teaching you how to interpret marks, breaks, and punctures to determine what kind of damage may have been inflicted while alive, at death, or sometime later. Elbroch shows how to approximate the age of animal (younger or older) when it died, and reveals how to determine the animal's sex, at least in some specimens. Also included in the book is an overview of techniques for cleaning skulls using hot or cold water or live beetles. Animal Skulls is an essential book for any naturalist's library. Stackpole Books. ISBN: 978-0-8117-3309-0. 727 Pages. 2006.

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Tracking & The Art of Seeing
How to Read Animal Tracks and Sign
by Paul Rezendes

      Tracking and the Art of Seeing is both a field guide and a work of art. Paul Rezendez is a wildlife photographer by trade, and the book is filled with stunning photos of the animals and the tracks they leave behind. But this isn't just a cute picture book for the coffee table. It is a tracking manual that is technical in its details, and also a sheer pleasure to read.

      In addition to the stellar photography of the animals and their tracks, the book includes detailed sketches of the tracks and gait patterns, as well as photos of the actual feet that made them, plus photos of animal scat and signs. The text covers a wide range of North American species, including rodents, hoofed animals, bears, raccoons, opossums, and members of the weasel, rabbit, dog, and cat families. Rezendez describes not only the signs the animals leave but also their lifestyle and habits throughout the year. Tracking and the Art of Seeing is most comprehensive in the author's home territory in the eastern states and does not cover some of the West's most common animals at all, including mule deer, pronghorn, prairie dogs, and badgers.

      The key difference between this book and some of the other top-notch tracking guides on the market is mostly in the organization of the information. For example, Mark Elbroch's Mammal Tracks & Sign (see above) is organized to help you identify an animal in comparison to others by tracks, scat, and sign. Tracking and the Art of Seeing covers largely similar information, but it is organized more like a chapter book, in which the whole story about a species is covered as a unit.

      Tracking and the Art of Seeing is ultimately more than just a tracking book. It is a guide to finding your connection to the world around you. It is a wonderful example of what an outdoor reference book can be, a source of information as well as inspiration. Collins. ISBN: 0-06-273524-1. 2nd edition, 1999. 336 pages.

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The Tracker's Field Guide
A Comprehensive Field Guide for Tracking in the United States
by James C. Lowery

      More than simply determining where an animal crossed the road, tracking can lead to a study of how the animal uses its habitat, how it travels, where it feeds or hunts, how it breeds and raises its young, and how it survives. In this book, Jim Lowery distills his expertise, gained over decades of intensive research and practical field experience, into a comprehensive field guide to tracking North American mammals.

      The Tracker's Field Guide includes some interesting features that are not covered, or not covered as well, in the other books. First, Lowery has included a simple comparison chart for print identification that makes it possible to quickly narrow down the possibilities based on the number of toes, the shape of the track, and whether or not claws are visible in the tracks. Next, the shaded and labeled tabs along the edges of the pages make it a snap to jump to the right family of animals for additional information. Once there, you will find, in addition to the photos and drawings of the tracks, a side-by-side comparison of multiple different gaits commonly used by each species. The book also includes photos of the tracks in context, showing trail segments and sign. Interestingly, Lowery maps out real-world examples, illustrating actual events he has observed in the wilds. These examples, along with the comprehensive text, provides the reader with a sort of window into the secret lives of the animals that live all around us. Lowery also includes some coverage of pressure-releases, connecting the dots between the type of soil displacement in the tracks, and how fast the animal was moving.

      Based primarily on his experiences in southern California, Lowery's book has a slightly western slant to it, but it covers in detail a wide variety of mammals, including all type of cats and dogs, rabbits and hares, rodents, weasels, raccoons, opossums, bears, insectivores, and an array of ungulates including sheep, burros, feral pigs, deer, and even llamas. The Tracker's Field Guide has a water-resistant, wipe clean cover with pre-rounded corners and extra-durable binding made to withstand the rigors of field use. It includes more than 500 high-resolution black-and-white photos plus hundreds of first-rate drawings. Falcon Press. ISBN: 0-7627-3981-9. 406 Pages. 2006.

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Mammal Tracking in North America
by Dr. James Halfpenny

      Tracks are more than just impressions in the mud, sand, or snow. They are a record of what an animal was doing, where it was going, and what it was thinking. Author Jim Halfpenny has taught tracking since 1967, and today he continues to lead people out to find the wolves of Yellowstone National Park or the polar bears of the arctic. My kids and I once borrowed a telescope from Jim Halfpenny on our way into Yellowstone, and Jim told us exactly where to go to see a grizzly bear. We drove out there, set up the telescope, and sure enough, there was a grizzly bear sitting on the side of the hill where he said it would be!

      Based directly on field research, Mammal Tracking in North America brings the amateur naturalist the latest information on animal gaits and the interpretation of scat. This book includes everything you need to know about track identification, gaits and following trails. Halfpenny takes special care to provide track comparisons between similar species, so you can identify tracks with confidence and accuracy. But identification is only the beginning. Reading the story behind the tracks is the real reward, and Halfpenny gives the reader the tools of a detective to read that story.

      Mammal Tracking in North America includes hundreds of artistic and precise illustrations by Elizabeth Biesiot, including stop-motion style drawings to better communicate the gait patterns, plus a handy photo gallery of scat for easy comparison. Mammal Tracking is just the right size, weight and content to bring on every outdoor trip. Johnson Books. ISBN: 0933472986. 163 pages. 1986. Printed with soy ink (except the cover) on recycled paper with 50% post-consumer content.

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Tracking Elk for Hunters
video by Dr. James Halfpenny

      Anyone who has worked with video knows that what the camera sees can be very different from what the human eye sees. Tracking can be especially difficult to portray on video, since the tracks or track details may not show up at all on camera. However, Jim Halfpenny has done a superb job of making the invisible truly visible through his video work.

      It is also very difficult to hold the attention of the audience with just one person on camera, but Halfpenny is a very dynamic speaker, and the tapes are well edited, so the viewer is easily captivated by his enthusiasm for the subject.

      Tracking Elk for Hunters is especially designed to help hunters interpret elk track and sign, determine the sex of the animals, predict where and when to find them, and ultimately track them after the shot. Whether you are a hunter or not you will learn all kinds of tips about elk and their habits. It is a very well done video, and most of the material presented in it is new and different from what is presented in Halfpenny's book or his other videos.

      International Customers Please Note: Do you know that different countries use different video formats? All our videos are in NTSC format, used mostly in North America, Japan and Taiwan. Not sure what format is used in your country? Click here to find out.

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Animal Tracks
A Peterson Field Guide
by Olaus J. Murie, Mark Elbroch and Roger Tory Peterson

      Animal Tracks is a classic book based on Murie's research starting in 1921 and first published in 1954. More than fifty years later it is still one of the best books on tracking. This all-new edition includes descriptions of the habits, habitats, tracks, signs, and ranges of all the mammals of North America, as well as of selected birds, reptiles, amphibians, and insects.

      Animal Tracks is especially helpful for track identification of the smaller animals, the woodchucks, ground squirrels, tree squirrels, chipmunks, rabbits, gophers, rats, mice, voles, shrews, etc. It also covers more obscure species that are not covered in other tracking books, such as the ringtail, peccary, armadillo, seals, opossum, birds, reptiles and amphibians. Animal Tracks covers tracks as well as gaits of more species than you would have thought existed in North America. Animal Tracks even covers the domestic livestock--sheep, cows, horses and pigs--to help you distinguish them from their wild cousins. More than one thousand line drawings and a hundred color photos show individual tracks, track patterns, droppings, and gnawed trees. The text includes natural history, inspirational stories, and relevant information about the tracks and signs of North American animals. Houghton Mifflin. ISBN: 061851743X. 432 pages. 2005.

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