Aspiring storytellers take note: Your backyard is full of tales about the daily trials and tribulations of the natural world.
The stories are embedded in the tracks made by the yard's inhabitants, and winter's snows make this season the best time to learn to read them, naturalists say.
Across the fresh white carpet, animal footprints—tracks—stand out, telling the story of a coyote stalking prey or a squirrel's scurry to a treeside food cache or the housecat's wild chase of a field mouse.
"Every track tells a story," said John Hanson Mitchell, an editor with the Massachusetts Audubon Society in Lincoln and author of the book A Field Guide to Your Own Backyard.
Mitchell said most of the stories are short and simple. They hint at a critter's presence with a sign of its passing. But the experienced tracker with a keen eye and lucid imagination can find tales of death and survival.
For example, Mitchell recounted a tale woven from a mouse track darting into the middle of his yard. There the track stopped, but the mouse was nowhere to be seen. Where did it go? Was it a mouse with wings?
Not quite, said the naturalist. Upon closer inspection the tale of the mouse's tragic death came alive. On either side of the dead-end track were two faint brush strokes from an owl's wings. A few feet beyond, there were telltale drops of blood. The mouse was an owl's meal.
"Tracking allows you to enter a doorway into the hidden lives of the animals. There's something fun about that," said Warren Moon, the executive director of the Wilderness Awareness School in Duvall, Washington.
The school offers courses in tracking that teach how tracks tell stories rich with information about the health of the natural world, Moon said.
For example, Moon said citizens can help scientists keep tabs on the abundance of critters by participating in programs such as the NatureMapping Program in Washington State. Like the National Audubon Society's annual bird counts, the program enlists citizens to keep an inventory of the animals in their communities.
"Tracking can also be a great form of exercise in moving meditation, it really attracts people for that kind of thing," said Nick Wisniewski, a founder of the Walnut Hill Tracking and Nature Center in Orange, Massachusetts. "It is very meditative and quieting. It gets you to slow down."
Track Alphabet
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