Here are some newly documented invertebrate tracks to share with you all in our Tracker Mentoring community.
A good friend and fellow tracker in South Africa, Rudi Hulshof, contacted us recently with a series of fascinating pictures which he took in the Thornybush near Hoedspruit. A dash-dash-dash type of line, running through dry sand. We were baffled by this, and our thoughts were initially leaning toward some type of beetle larvae, crossing the dry road.
Rudi had taken the time to follow the trail, and then sent us a picture of the culprit…a leech! It appears that the leech had miscalculated, and only dropped from the animal it was feeding on some 80 metres from a small pan, onto dry ground. An amazing discovery, and a totally new one for us!
The pictures you can see here are of the creature itself and also of the trail. In later newsletters we will show some similar looking trails, which will be useful for separating these confusing species!
Featured item from the Tracker Mentoring shop:
We have taken some time to design a new tracker mentoring ruler, a small, credit card sized option for you to carry in your wallet or purse. Imagine, you will always have your ruler with you for scale! It is brown to prevent too much contrast when you photograph in natural conditions and etched to look like wood even though it’s made of a durable and easily cleaned plastic. It has inches on one side and centimetre measurements on the other, and can also double as a bookmark in your tracking books.
On the back, however, is something special…the Ten Rules of Tracking, as taught by Master Tracker Adriaan Louw, and our “Golden Rule” of Tracking that comes before all else… because being able to identify a fresh trail from an old one is probably the most important feature of finding an animal.
