Customer Reviews

Field Guide to Tracking Animals in Snow

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Begins with an intro which covers generalizations about tracking animals in snow, and even covers how to preserve tracks made in snow. Pencil drawings provide clear detail and pix of the animal as well as its tracks. Range maps included (book covers USA. A good balance between adequate coverage and so much info that you become overwhelmed. This is good for beginner to intermediate trackers. Book is focused on mammals. Only one spread on birds. This book is standard gear on my winter hikes.

I was extremely disappointed in this book given the amazing potential for information on snow tracking.

I'll start with the good stuff:

1) A good key on the inside cover.

Thats about it...

The bad stuff
What I would have liked to see and what was not in this book to my liking:

1) Natural history of animals in winter as opposed to other seasons. There is some information, but still not enough to aid the tracker.

2) An analysis of drag marks in the snow.

3) Actual pictures of prints, which although there are 10 questions or so in the back of the book with real prints, they are so badly taken and poorly described with no close-ups that there's no real way to be sure about the print from the picture.

4) Which animals use non-characteristic gaits in the snow and why.

5) Pictures of tracks aged in the snow and how the shape of the track changes in the snow. There is almost nothing on this book talking about characteristic aging of track shapes in the snow - like how to tell direction of travel in deer on week old snowed in tracks (no book mentions this, but this is what I would expect to see in a winter tracking book).

6) Angles of entry and exit into the snow and characteristic morphology of tracks in the snow.

7) More than the 1 or 2 gaits presented for each animal, better measurements, etc.

8) Behavior studies! Snow tracking gives us an amazing opportunity to study the track by track behavior of an animal. I couldn't believe that the book didn't explore this dimension of tracking.

9) Much more information on birds could have been done. And some of the tracks DO NOT at all look like tracks of the birds I've seen. There's also no natural history information on birds tracking and sign in winter.

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I think this book will give the novice tracker a false sense of knowing how to track, and what to look for. Many bird tracks look a lot like small mammal tracks, and it is very difficult to distinguish between cottontails, squirrels, and chipmunks in the snow if you are not familiar with them. This book does not give you the necessary information to track confidently in the snow.

Beyond that, there's nothing in this book that you can't find elsewhere, much better, more thorough, and more visually appealing.

The book was published to aid the beginning tracker - but tracking books by Murie and Lowery are much better for that. I'm sure Louise is a great tracker, but this is a poorly written book that does not appreciate the beauty of winter tracking by oversimplifying it to tracking in general.

For information on snow tracking, get Elbroch's book, the 4 pages in there he devotes to snow tracking is more useful than this entire book.

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Thomas Meli
http://www.thomasmeli.com