It’s finally here! We’ve received the first 30 printed copies of The Tracker Mentoring Manual for Course 1 – Introduction to Tracking in Southern Africa from our publishers in Cape Town. Of course, as with most publications, we always find little errors to fix, but overall we are pretty pleased. It’s a little different from …
The area where our camp, Ngala Training Camp, is, is in the Balule Private Nature Reserve, which is an area that is open to the vast spaces of the Kruger, with a free flow and animals to and from. Last month, one of our students from Jamestown, Rhode Island, in the USA, sent us $20 …
From: The Tracker Mentoring Manual, Course 1 – Introduction to Tracking in Southern Africa An example: Daily Routine 2 – Practice being curious! Here’s a link to a video on our YouTube channel that we took of a Spotted Sandveld Lizard (Nucras intertexta) digging a burrow just outside our tent in the Balule. It’s a …
Spotted sandveld lizard digging a burrow (South Africa) Read More »
This is a classic Cape Buffalo dung pile. They look like large pellets, folded into each other and sometimes just a large “plop.” They resemble the dung of domestic cows (or domestic cow dung resembles their dung). Similar species: On occasion, we have seen very atypical waterbuck and giraffe scats that resemble this, but the …
Feedback on our first online course – An Introduction to Tracking We’ve had some fantastic posts in the Private Facebook group by our new students, and some wonderful feedback. We have students from the UK, The USA, South Africa, Tanzania, Australia, Germany… it’s a truly international crowd! We asked “How are you finding the course …
This photo was taken near Siren, Wisconsin, at our annual Deer Trailing Workshop and CyberTracker Trailing Evaluation with North Winds Wilderness School and the Minnesota Tracking Project. Jonathan Poppele (Tracker 2) and Blake Samuele Southard (Tracker 2) were present, and refrained from answering, but contributed with their great senses of humour. Annie Du-Pre Reynolds (Tracker …
White-tailed deer tracks in leaf litter, Wisconsin, USA Read More »
These photos were taken at our training venue, Ngala Training Camp, in the Balule Region of the Greater Kruger, South Africa. The first photo is fresh, and the second one, older. Frikkie Kotze answered this question correctly in our #trackertuesdays #dailytrackingchallenge. It’s scrub hare urine signs! Frikkie had this as a question on a #CyberTracker …
Patrick Bernard Oreja made an educated guess on this one in our #trackertuesdays #weeklytrackingchallenge, “Green pigeon? Fruit seed matter curling up the scat and colouring it. Can also see Uric acid.” Pigeons and doves (family Columbidae), create spiraled little scats under roosts. Depending on what they are eating, they can appear as tight little coils …
Mammal tracks always seem to attract more interest than others, perhaps because that’s what we typically think about tracking, when we think about tracking… In our #trackertuesdays #weeklytrackingchallenge we had three answers from three different countries for this one: Ross Marcel Gariepy (SA) – Zebra, odd toed ungulate or hoofed animal. Mike Watling (USA) – …
Zebra (zeh-brah, not zee-brah) tracks, South Africa Read More »
The veld here in South Africa is still recovering from many years of drought. As a result, the animals are becoming more abundant. More and more, we are seeing these dry, grassy nests, and they aren’t always in rocks. Sometimes, they are in hollows in dead (or still living) trees. We identify them by the …