Customer Reviews

Mammal Tracks : Life-Size Tracking Guide

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It has been so hard to find a decent tracking book, but now here's a good one. What I like best is that it gives me a game plan for determining what type of tracks I'm looking at. In the past, I've been overwhelmed trying to find the tracks in front of me in a book. This book has me first looking at how the tracks are laid out in comparison with each other: hoppers, bounders, waddlers. There are plenty of pictures and explanations to guide me. Just this little change in perspective taught me a lot about the animals I am trying to track. From there, I'm given more ideas on what to look for and what the tracks are telling me. This book is not only teaching me how to identify tracks (which alone is pretty good), but it is also teaching me about the animals themselves and how they move and interact with their environment. A few days after getting this book, my boyfriend and I went skiing. As we rode the chairlift over the snow, we both spotted some tracks beneath us and in one voice shouted "Ah-ha! Bounders!" It was a joyous start to really understanding mammal tracking.

This informative, easy to follow guide has truly been designed to be used on nature walks. One of the amazing things about this guide is in its appeal to young and more mature readers alike. The large pages and clear drawings (not to mention the waterproof paper) allows you to put the pages right on the forest floor or on the snow, to get a true side-by-side comparison of the tracks.

The authors have taken great pains to teach the reader how to determine not only the type of animal's tracks, but what the animal may have been doing, with examples along the way. The novice tracker will appreciate the authors' three-step approach to determining the type of animal you are tracking.

They also refer to the "magical experience" of tracking, which can often be lost in the clinical process. It's almost as though you are given permission to walk in the animal's tracks and "be" the marvelous creature you are tracking and learning about.

This book should be part of any outdoor organization's required reading. It takes the mystery out of tracking, but leaves the magic. Brava!!!

Lynn Levine, a renowned tracker and naturalist in Vermont, has compiled a great resource for anyone interested in wildlife tracking. I've used many books and resources to help me learn how to track, and this is quickly becoming one of my favorites! It's very portable, waterproof, and has lots of great details that are easy to quickly access in the field. The best part of this guide for me is the fact that the tracks in the guide are life-sized! My husband and I were out tracking on our property a couple of weeks ago, and we found some old tracks that were either made by a cottontail rabbit or a snowshoe hare. As novice trackers, we sat there with a measuring card trying to deduce what critter made the tracks. When we looked up the two species in Lynn's tracking guide, we immediately SAW that there was no way that anything but a cottontail rabbit could have made those tracks in this part of the country. That is but one of many discoveries we have already made in only a few weeks of owning the book. This is a wonderful addition to our library that any tracker, novice or expert, would be fortunate to have!