Bear tracks

Last Friday I commented on Jeff VanderMeer’s essay for Orion, wherein he argued that it’s kind of silly to get obsessed with Bigfoot when there are real actual bears out there doing demonstrably interesting things.

I share VanderMeer’s love of bears, and finding bear tracks and sign is one of my favorite tracking experiences. Bears are genuinely interesting creatures who leave large and noticeable signs on the landscape, and of the mammals one is likely to find sign of in the Pacific Northwest, in a lot of ways they’re similar to us: curious, playful, clever, and willing to eat just about anything.

It’s also easy to see how bear tracks and sign might feed some people’s notions of there being Something Else out there. For example:


(Black bear tracks, Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area.)

Most of us will never get a closeup view of a bear’s feet, though images are easy to come by (I recommend a reliable source such as Kim Cabrera or Mark Elbroch, though—there are some really, really bad track images out there, many of them AI generated). Unless you’re a biologist, naturalist, or hunter, chances are you haven’t given much thought to what bear feet look like. As it turns out, they’re not all that dissimilar from human (though the gait is completely different, and they tend to walk with their toes canted somewhat inward).


(Black bear tracks, Oregon Dunes. In order, from top to bottom: left front, right front, left hind, right hind feet.)

It’s not just tracks that bears leave, of course. I’ll spare you the poop photos, though rest assured, bears do in fact shit in the woods. Depending on the time of year and what’s available foodwise, the contents and consistency vary widely, but there’ll generally be more of it than what’s left by most other animals. They also have a habit of leaving their poop in the middle of trails (rude). Often the same trails humans use. The overlap of human and other-than-human trail use is an interesting subject in itself, which I’ll write about at some point. For now, suffice to say that I’ve had excellent luck placing trail cameras along roadways and walking paths.


(This camera along the driveway on our rural property in Washington State has confirmed the presence of many species, including this black bear.)

But I was talking about other signs that bears leave. An important one is marking on trees with their claws to communicate presence and territory to other bears. I’ve seen these marks in many locations now; this set came from a tree in a forest near Woodinville, WA:


(Bear claw marks on a western redcedar tree.)

Sometimes they can be hard to spot. Douglas fir bark, for instance, is so thick and flaky that you might have to look closely to see the marks:


(Black bear claw marks on a Douglas fir, Methow Valley.)

When I tell people that I’m into tracking, it’s not uncommon for people to make a Bigfoot joke. That got old approximately three seconds after the first time I heard it, but in a way it also highlights something troubling about a lot of people’s interaction with the natural world, and also why I got into tracking in the first place: Bigfoot jokes are an expression of unease over not really knowing what’s out there. Other examples are worries over being attacked by a mountain lion on a hike (supremely unlikely) or being spooked by strange noises in the woods at night (admittedly unsettling, but ordinary animals make more and weirder sounds than most of us realize). Or sharing AI videos of wild animals doing things that wild animals would never do. (A mountain lion is not going to adopt a bunch of house cats. I’m sorry. You probably don’t want to know what the mountain lion would do.)

The thing is, though, not knowing what’s out there is an addressable problem. You don’t need to become a tracker (though it’s fun!) or a biologist. All you really need is some curiosity, a field guide or two, and the willingness to spend some time learning and exploring.


(Tracking can help determine trail camera placement, though, and then you can get cool photos like this.)

You soon find that bears—and other animals—are genuinely fascinating. So are coyotes. And deer. And squirrels. And Northern Flickers. And spiders. And fungus.

Curiosity, after all, is something that we share with bears. And it’s a lot more rewarding than Bigfoot.


(Black bear investigating one of my trail cameras. The camera still worked afterward!)

(Originally posted at welltemperedwriter. You can comment here or there.)

Gratitude for the guy who taught my husband to self-rescue a tractor

(Not our actual tractor. Ours looks like this though.)

Yesterday, we managed to get a Kubota tractor—a big one, with a backhoe attachment—stuck in the mud.

Nine years ago my husband and I bought some rural acreage, most of which is unmaintained woodland. The guy we bought it from had been managing it for timber, sort of, but wasn’t very good at it. (No shade, neither are we.) What we have now is early-stage successional forest with some stands of mature trees here and there, mostly around a large wetland and on some slopes too steep for logging. We also have a number of old logging roads slowly being reclaimed by the forest, though I can attest that once you know how to look for them, this particular bit of infrastructure takes a lot longer to vanish from the landscape than you’d think.

Yesterday we were working on a patch of roadway that we’re trying to keep accessible, both to reach the further extent of our own acreage and enable access to parcels for which this road is the only access. (This concern is mostly academic because nobody’s really using those further parcels for anything except hunting, and hunters tend to walk in.)

This roadway runs along the bottom of a steep hill, at the top of which is where we’re having our house built. This is important because all the runoff from the northwestern side of that hill tends to collect at a particular spot along the roadway. What’s more, there’s a seep nearby; this patch of land never fully dries out, even in summer, when it can go for weeks or even months without raining.

I mention all of this to explain why my husband managed to get the tractor stuck in the mud yesterday. The roadbed we were working on is still pretty solid—it used to hold logging trucks, after all—but off to the sides was all soft mud. He was trying to get around some deadfall that was still blocking the roadway and also pass the truck we’d brought down to haul our tools and other gear.

If there’s a Bingo card for suburbanites trying to adopt country living, I feel like getting your tractor stuck has to be somewhere on it. Fortunately for both us and the tractor, several months ago the guy who did some excavation work for our septic system taught my husband how to use the backhoe attachment to help pull yourself out of such situations. I may have had a minor freakout when one of the tractor’s front wheels left the ground during the operation, leaving me to wonder if the seat belt that, yes, I was wearing would really keep me from falling out if the whole thing tipped over. (My husband pointed out later that his seat, back to back with mine while he operated the backhoe, was even more precarious.)

Yesterday was not the day I found out, thankfully.

The guy who taught my husband that maneuver has since retired and left the state, but if I ever run into him I’m buying him lunch. Today, I’m grateful for people like him helping fish out of water like us.

(Originally posted at welltemperedwriter. You can comment here or there.)

Saving Wikipedia, IMLS Propaganda, Tracking and Seeing, Henry Mansfield, My TBR

“In Search of Wikipedia’s Saviors” by Imogen West-Knights is an interesting take on the crowdsourced encyclopedia at this present moment, when the entity just agreed to terms to receive compensation for having its content leveraged by AI. When I was in library school, Wikipedia was still new enough to be looked at askance by the profession in general, though several people—including some of my classmates—recognized its potential right away. The reminder of what can be achieved by human-scale diligence is timely, as is why certain authoritarian parties would like to see Wikipedia disappear.

Kelly Jensen discusses what’s happening with the Institute for Museum and Library Services in “The IMLS Propaganda Machine Is In Full Swing”. The IMLS is one of those agencies that you’ve probably only heard of if you work in the fields it names, but what’s been going on there in terms of funding and, more troublingly, ideology ought to disturb everyone. It’s yet another example of the Trump administration redirecting funding that for years has served the public to great effect, into a partisan project that primarily serves his own self-aggrandizement.

“Tracks, Tracking, and the Urge to See” is a lovely meditation by a fellow tracker on tracking as a fundamental human activity: to discern presence on the landscape through signs left behind, to construct context and ultimately meaning. It was a quest for this kind of connection that led me to tracking ten years ago, and tracking has led me in many ways to where I am now. It’s interesting to me how much tracking is showing up lately in my reading on conservation, environmental stewardship, naturalist field knowledge, and other such topics. Trackers I’ve studied with are contributing to the collection of scientific data, and even publishing papers.

I’ll admit it, the only reason I watched Henry Mansfield’s “Bend Your Knees” video is it was shot at the roller rink a mile from my house, but this song is utterly charming and the video is impressive. Especially the player of the bass drum, who like almost everyone else is doing it on roller skates.

Finally, instead of things I’ve read (except for The Body is a Doorway, which I’ve begun), here are things I’m going to read:



(Originally posted at welltemperedwriter. You can comment here or there.)