Animal tracking, once a nearly lost art, has re-emerged as an important focus for nature enthusiasts and a necessary skill for wildlife scientists and environmentalists. A tracking field guide is now an essential part of an outdoors-person’s tool kit, and recent decades have seen the publication of a number of animal tracking books. Several of these are of high quality, but even the best books show a limited number of images for each species. Frustration arises when would-be trackers encounter tracks that don’t look like the illustrations in their tracking books.
A Field Guide to Tracking Mammals in the Northeast (Countryman Press, W.W. Norton) addresses this need by portraying a wide range of appearances for the tracks of each species. The illustrations (meticulously drawn from the author’s extensive collection of photographs) are accompanied by thorough discussions of distinguishing features, measurements for tracks and gaits, diagrams of characteristic gaits, and notes on scat and other sign. A Field Guide to Tracking Mammals in the Northeast is lightweight and compact yet comprehensive in its coverage of forty mammal species found in the Northeast, and is an ideal tool for trackers at all levels. You can order it here