How to Measure Tracks in Animal Tracking

Video Transcript

Hi! We are Nick and Valerie Wisniewski on behalf of expertvillage.com. We are here to talk about animal tracking and for more information; you can visit our website walnuthilltracking.com. We are going to talk about how to measure an animal’s track. When measuring an animal’s track, we use a tape measure that is measured in inches. We don’t use the metric system but if you have some data you can obviously convert the data if you wish. We start with measuring the width of an animals track and using a tape measure we like to not use the middle tab because there is some inaccuracy that is there. It is not much but it is a little bit. We will actually start with the line of 1 inch and we will put that on the outside edge of the animal’s toes. We will lay it directly over and when we are looking at the track, we want to make sure we are looking straight down not from an angle because that will distort it. Looking straight down we want to find the floor of the animals toe which means the absolute bottom of the toe as it make contact with the ground. So putting the one there, we’ll lay the tape carefully over the top of the track and over here on the other toe looking straight down we find the floor of the toe and we will take a measurement there. So we get a measurement of about 1 ¾ inches wide. Next we want to look at the length of the track. When measuring the track, we include the nail marks. Here you can see there are nail marks in the front of the track. We want to include those and at the back we are including the heel pad. On canine and cats, this metacarpal pad we call the heel pad. So we are going to measure from here to here. As we did with the width, we are using that one inch line coming all the way back down here looking straight down at the track and we will get a length of about 2 ½ inches. Knowing the length and the width of an animals track will help you determine what species left the track on the ground.

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