Woodlife Trails

This is the first of a number of occasional posts exploring in a little more depth the subject of tracking. I’ll put them in a new category ‘tracking insights.’

The fictitious Sherlock Holmes written by Arthur Conan Doyle coined the phrase ‘the Science of Deduction.’  Deduction is a skill that I believe trackers should develop and tracking itself may be human-kind’s first ever science. If you look at some definitions of science most will say something like; “…the pursuit of knowledge in order to come to a correct prediction or reliable outcome.”

Murder scene – Victim, suspect and possible witness

‘Reliable outcome’ is in keeping with the result trackers aspire to attain, especially if they intend to find their quarry on the end of an active track . The words ‘correct prediction’ seem contradictory but in truth, a prediction may only be the best result a tracker will achieve, especially when not on an active track i.e. the tracker is ‘studying’ the tracks and signs to ascertain that something has happened. But are predictions acceptable and are they just an excuse for guesswork? The story in the tracks will only be, at the most, an informed guess of what has happened or a prediction of what will occur – unless you’ve actually seen what’s happened that is. So how can we move from the point of a correct prediction toward a more reliable outcome?

Who, what, when, where and how?

The ‘pursuit of knowledge’ or study of an individual foot print will not get us anywhere near this reliable outcome. We may have to find other evidence in order to get to our conclusion. Evidence such as trails, runs, local environments, knowledge of the animals themselves, an understanding of plants or other food the animals feed on, the gait, other tracks, feeding signs and inevitable waste-products or ‘scat’ to name just a few will help.

Feeding signs – a piece of the jigsaw

The physical evidence (variably also called ‘sign’ or ‘spoor’) will all be there. “Every contact leaves a trace” is Edmund Locard’s Exchange Principle. All we have to do is find it before it fades into the landscape with age. Locard was the 20^th century father of forensic science and a contemporary of Conan Doyle. It might answer to Sherlock Holmes’s love of forensic science. I enjoy comparing tracking to detective work. A lot of tracking is akin to crime scene examination with similar investigative processes, reconstructions, evidential links, collection and study of evidence, and ultimately a deductive process.

How was his Badger feeling?

Some of the evidence may be conclusive, for example the naming of the species from a clearly obvious print like a badger print. This will start us down the road to our reliable outcome and answers the question, “What is it?” Unfortunately, it won’t answer the other questions every tracker should be posing? For example where was it going, what was it doing, how and why was it doing it, when was it there and the myriad of other questions, even down to slightly esoteric questions like how was it feeling.

More often than not, our evidence will not be conclusive, merely corroborative. It will be a small piece in a jig-saw or a missing word in the sentence. Once we have gathered all our evidence, we will start to see a picture or story unfold. We will then start to reason and deduce to ascertain the possible. If we can’t do that, we should look at eliminating the impossible. Once that process is complete, whatever is left (to roughly quote Sherlock) no matter how improbable has to be the truth. A perfect scientific deduction, my dear Watson! But, unfortunately, still only a prediction.

The acute knowledge of the environment and quarry

Many books will say that tracking is a science and an art. Many people interpret this to mean that tracking is spiritual. It may well be, but that’s a discussion for another time and another place. We are lucky in that the deductions we make during tracking do not have to stand up to the rigours of court. We are allowed to take on board a few liberties, such as assumptions, estimates and speculation.

The ‘art’ of detection is a by-product of scientific analysis coupled with the ‘art’ of interpretation; similar to an interpretation of a landscape painting on canvas by an artist. Acute knowledge of the quarry and the environment will bring some credibility to the inevitable suppositions and probabilities. For the tracker, this could carry as much weight as the scientific study of each individual piece of physical evidence. If we merge our scientific definition with our art of interpretation, we move more towards a correct prediction resulting in more of an acceptable, if not reliable, outcome.