How to Identify Walks in Animal Tracking

Video Transcript

Hi! We are Nick and Valerie Wisniewski on behalf of expertvillage.com. We are here to talk about animal tracks and for more information you can visit our website at walnuthillstracking.com. There on the ground in front of us we’ve got many different animal tracks including raccoon, human being but we are mostly interested in this pair of coyotes that were traveling through here. This particular track here is what we would call a direct register. It is a little bit sloppy for coyotes but when we talk about direct register what we mean is that the front foot and the hind foot step in almost the exactly the same place. Often times it is impossible to even decipher the fact that there were two tracks there so neatly placed. That is a characteristic of coyotes. Here we have a little bit different thing going on. This is what we would call an indirect register and an indirect register means that instead of the hind foot landing where the front foot was, it will step off to the side a little bit or a little bit to the front or a little bit hind giving an indirect register. Normally the coyote travels in what we call a direct register trot. When is doing something else it is useful to know track patterns because they can tell a little bit about behavior. Here we made a plaster cast of a coyote in the area and this particular coyote was moving at what we call an overstep walk. This is the front foot and this is the hind foot. When a coyote does this, it is not a normal way that it moves about the landscape. Knowing this can tell us a little bit about its behavior. Its behavior has changed. It is no longer in a trot. It is moving into something a little bit faster than a trot called an overstep trot. Another animal that will leave a similar pattern on the ground is a bobcat. Here we have a plaster cast of a bobcat track, two tracks; the front and the hind. This bobcat is also doing an overstep but for the bobcat that is one of its most common ways of moving around the landscape. So we can tell by comparing those two patterns they the eastern coyote is transitioning out of its preferred method of locomotion to something else whereas here the bobcat is moving about in its preferred way of moving around the landscape. Knowing this kind of information can help you decipher behavior of animals.

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