How to Identify Gallops 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 animal tracking. For more information, you can visit our website at walnuthilltracking.com. On the ground in front of us, are what at first seem to be just random imprints of tracks in the ground. What we are going to do is Valerie is going to stake these out with some popsicle sticks that we colored coded in an attempt to find out what kind of pattern is here, if there is a pattern at all. What Valerie is going to do is she is going to use different colors for front feet and for hind feet. Where the front feet she is putting black stakes in the ground and for hind feet of this animal, she is putting red stakes in the ground. As she does that, almost immediately a pattern starts to jump out at us. Instead of just a vague series of impressions on the ground, we now see what turns out to be groups of four. Looking more closely on the ground we can see that in the beginning here is a group of four prints followed by a large space and then another group of four prints followed by another large space, followed by another group of four prints and so on continuing. Looking very quickly at the pattern we can see there is a front foot here, a front foot here, a hind foot here and a hind foot there. In this group what is happening is the animal is in a gallop. A gallop is a very high rate of speed and indicates either that the animal is running away from something or chasing something. Judging by the length of the group and the length of this space in between the groups we can tell that this is an eastern coyote. Either the coyote was in pursuit of some prey or it was running away from something that it wanted to get away from namely humans. Knowing this kind of information can help you determine species but also behavior.

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