Kindle Edition
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Category:
Family
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing, NYC
ISBN-10: 1510737731
Type: Non-Fiction
Pages: 354
Copyright: January 07, 2020
ISBN-13: 9781510737730
Price: $12.99 (eBook)
Essential Skills for Identifying and Trailing Animals (A BSA Scouting Guide)
In Scouting’s Guide to Tracking, current Scouts, Scout alumni, and readers interested in the outdoors are provided with time-tested advice on how to track big and small animals over different types of terrain. Some practical tips include:
How to determine the age of tracks in any circumstance
How to recognize the distinctive marks of dozens of different species
How to track in desert, forest, snow, and grassy areas
How to identify instances when an animal has circled around or backtracked
Stalking techniques such as cold hunting, camouflaging, and using the stump method
How time and weather affect signs
And so much more!
Since 1910, the Boy Scouts of America has helped build the future leaders of this country by combining educational activities and lifelong values with fun. The BSA is committed to training youth in responsible citizenship, character development, and self-reliance through participation in a wide range of outdoor activities.
Excerpt
Everything that touches or moves over the earth leaves a sign of its passing (one old tracking proverb says that even an eagle can be tracked if it poops often enough). Since the earliest hominids (our ancestral humans) learned to live together in tribal communities, trackers were among a tribe's most highly regarded members. It was they who were relied upon to track the animals their brethren ate to within range of a primitive weapon, and then to continue to track them until they were rendered into meat.
Insert photo: TraxMixed.006: Everything that moves over the earth, even under water, leaves a sign that it it passed there; it falls to a tracker to recognize and follow those clues.
Until the invention of modern hunting weapons, animals as large as a deer did not often die with the first shot, especially if the weapon used was a bow-and-arrow or a lance. Even today, African Bushmen take it for granted that an antelope shot by their most skilled archer will need to be tracked for miles, and shot perhaps twice more before it dies. You can imagine how hard it was for Sioux hunters to take down a bison on the plains of western America.
Insert photo: PrimitiveBow03: Still in use by aboriginal societies today, primitive bows are under-powered by modern archery standards, yet effective enough to keep entire tribes fed, providing hunters are also skilled trackers.
The ability to track and read sign is the closest that any of us will come to having a genuine super power. That's why forensic crime scene investigation shows have been so popular on television. To come onto a scene and use only your own senses of sight, touch, smell, and even taste to interpret what had happened before you got there can be a pretty impressive feat. A skilled tracker or forensics expert can not only tell what had happened, but how long ago it had occurred, and sometimes a good deal more that escapes notice by an ordinary person. As TV ratings show, the ability to create a true story from evidence at or around a scene is pretty amazing to people who lack the expertise to do that themselves.
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