rimrunner | Entries tagged with tracking life

You’ll see this assertion a lot in online tracking communities; it’s even part of the spiel on telling the difference between canine and feline tracks at a sanctuary where I volunteer. Claws mean dog; no claws mean cat.

First of all, that’s not necessarily true. Cats do have claws, after all, and just because they tend to keep them retracted when on the move doesn’t mean that they always do. There are no universal, one hundred percent always true criteria in tracking. Variations in substrate, in behavior, in movement, and many other variables make for tracks and sign that show up differently than you’d expect.

Secondly, stopping at a single criterion or description when IDing a track or sign risks short-circuiting the observational skill that tracking both leverages and trains. Even when I’m sure of an ID, I’ve gotten into the habit of looking for at least three indications that I’m correct. Every so often, doing so causes me to change my mind—or at least consider alternatives to my ID. If I can’t come up with three, I need to study more.

But let’s get back to cats and dogs.

It is true that the claws guideline is often a reliable starting point.

Feline and canine tracks are similar, but there are several ways to distinguish them beyond claws. To begin with, there’s the overall shape: canine tracks are generally more oval, longer front to back than side to side. Feline tracks are generally rounder. They both have four toes, but the dog’s tracks will have the middle two toes leading, while the outer toes are set further back (and, in some species such as the coyote and black-backed jackal, are almost behind the middle toes). Meanwhile, the cat’s toes are more spread out laterally. One of the two middle toes will usually be slightly ahead of all the rest, and that will indicate whether the foot that made it was a left or a right.

Here are some nice, clear canine tracks, a front and hind side by side. The overall tidiness and diminutive size leads me to ID this as coyote.

Here already we’ll run into exceptions. While the above holds true for every wild canine I’ve ever seen, and every wild or domestic feline, domestic dog tracks can vary enormously when it comes to overall shape and how the toes show up in relation to one another in the track. There’s also the question of substrate: something loose and slippery, like deep, dry sand, can cause even a canine foot to spread out laterally. I once misidentified a mountain lion track as a large domestic dog for this very reason. (Also, claws—but we’ll come back to that!)

The above can affect the placement of the toes in relation to the palm or heel; that said, as a general rule, with a canine track you can draw an “X” by making two lines starting between the outer toes on each side, and going straight to the bottom of the track, without ever crossing the heel pad. With a feline track, at least one of those lines will cross the heel pad.

Here’s a nice, clear bobcat track, found on a dirt road in western Washington.

Then there’s the shape of the heel pad. If you’re lucky enough to find a super clear and detailed track, you’ll see a more triangular shape to the heel if the track is canine, while the feline’s is more trapezoidal. The canine track will have two lobes at the rear of the heel pad, while the feline track will have three—though this is one of those details that tends to show up less clearly in messy substrate. The way that I’m giving exceptions to every guideline here hopefully highlights the importance of having more than one support for a given ID.

And that goes for claws, too. Cats use claws for two things: as weapons, and for traction. On slippery ground, such as mud, snow, or soft sand, they might well use their claws to keep from sliding.

Similarly, claws don’t always show in canine tracks. Coyote claws can be so narrow and pointed that they don’t register on harder substrate, and gray foxes actually have semi-retractable claws.

A pair of gray fox tracks. The overall characteristics are distinctly canine, but claws are not showing.

One of the frustrating things about tracking is that there are always exceptions. That’s also one of the wonderful things about it. On an eval I took recently there was so much debate about one of the stations that even the evaluators finally agreed that there was room for an alternative interpretation. I often like to say that the wildlife hasn’t read the field manuals, and even guidebooks written by experts aren’t prescriptive. Asking further questions is an invitation to look for further evidence. Sometimes, those are the claws of a cat.

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

Current Mood: nerdy

One of the tricky but rewarding things about tracking is gait analysis. This is the skill of determining how an animal was moving based on tracks left behind. It can be tricky, in part because most of the animals we’re looking at move on four feet, and humans only move on two (most of the time, anyway). This makes it challenging to map out that movement using our own bodies. Though it can be fun to try, assuming you’re flexible enough.

Every species has a baseline gait, the way members of that species move when they’re relaxed and not in a rush. For humans it’s a walk; if we’re running, there’s usually some urgency afoot, pun not intended. Think about every dog you’ve ever seen, especially if they aren’t leashed. They might be dashing around and chasing things, but if they’re just kind of checking things out, the baseline gait is a trot. This also holds for coyotes and wolves, as well as African wild dogs and jackals.

One of my favorite tracks to find is American porcupine, which I’ve only seen at the Oregon Dunes and at Ancient Lakes in eastern Washington. The baseline porcupine gait is a direct register walk, which means that the animal’s hind feet step exactly where their front feet did. Each track you see on the ground is actually two tracks, one on top of the other. There’s also the indirect register walk, where the overlap is not complete. Like this:

This gait, combined with porcupines’ short legs—I’m not sure they’re even capable of running—caused me to designate their baseline gait as a trundle. This is highly unofficial, but it was amusing enough to me and the others at the Oregon Dunes tracking course that by the end of the class, we were all referring to porcupine movement this way.

Trundling really means to move by rolling, or to move an object by rolling it—this can be a wagon, a ball, or a wheel of cheese. But it can also mean moving heavily or clumsily. Porcupines aren’t clumsy, exactly, but with their short legs and unhurried movement, they don’t inspire descriptions of grace the way a deer or large cat does:

Watch on YouTube

Thus, the trundle. It really gives a porcupine vibe, don’t you think?

Current Mood: nerdy

Guess what? Coyote butt!

…a little over three weeks, actually. Though I’ve had longer gaps in blogging before, lately I’ve been trying to make a more regular practice of it, for a few different reasons. The main one is that I enjoy it. Other reasons include reflecting on things in a way that accounts for the possibility that someone might read them, as well as my annoyance at how many people I know who, instead of sharing their own thoughts (however awkwardly phrased), repost narratives that are either obviously AI-generated, or (more troubling in my view) written in that rhetorical style, because that’s what’s getting shared. This mostly happens on Facebook, and is a major reason that I’m spending less time there.

Probably good for me.

The week before last, I went down to the Oregon Dunes for a three-day tracking course, followed by a CyberTracker evaluation. I’d scored a 99% on my last track and sign eval in the Pacific Northwest, and I was hoping this time around to gain that elusive one hundred. That didn’t happen, but I learned a lot and got to enjoy being in my tracking community, and those are what count.

The Dunes are an amazing combination of vast stretches of sand, and a coastal rainforest ecosystem. I’ve found salamander tracks leading across the dunes in between the forested deflation zones or larger tree islands. From the tops of the dunes you can see all the way to the sea. The shape of the landscape shifts over time, and yet there are landmarks. Dangers are few, but the one that always unnerves me are the stovepipes. The sand has buried entire groves of trees, and when these die and rot away, they can leave hollow columns behind. Step in one of these and your leg might go in up to your hip.

I’ve gone there alone a few times in spite of this, and that can be fun, in the way that chosen solitude is fun. I’ve chosen my own route across the sand and napped on the beach. But going with a group, especially a group of fellow trackers, is the best. Not just for safety reasons, but because you learn more with a group.

When I got back I spent much of the week getting ready for the community garage sale. This is a huge annual event that this year involved over 600 households. Mine was small and off the beaten path, but I still had a steady trickle of people all day. I was surprised at how popular the CDs were, but perhaps the same people who haunt garage sales are also fans of physical media. In the final ten minutes I sold off the second of two tents, a battery charger, and an old rice cooker—it still works of course, but we’d replaced it with a bigger one.

I also went to see Carmen at Seattle Opera with an old friend. Carmen has a lot about it that’s pretty problematic, mostly having to do with race, but there’s a lot you can mitigate with staging and presentation. This production was more sympathetic to its lead than some I’ve seen. (I’ve never found José, the male lead, sympathetic at all, though he’s supposed to read as normative at least. Hmph.)

And then, of course, Sunday was Mother’s Day, so I visited my parents and then went on an outing with South Sound Tracking Club.

Anyway, all that means I haven’t had much time to write, though I did complete some freelance work.

I don’t have any clever note to end this on, but that’s what’s up.

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

Current Mood: tired

Walk without rhythm, and you won't attract the worm.

The Oregon Dunes is one of my favorite places to visit, full stop. It’s also one of my favorite places to go tracking. The large expanses of bare sand punctuated by patches of vegetation and trees, together with what’s still a coastal Pacific Northwest rainforest in terms of weather and ecology, makes for a perfect combination. In the early morning, the sand is often damp from the previous night’s marine layer; if you get out on the sand before it dries out and the wind erases the tracks, you can find everything from bears and coyotes to salamanders and Pacific chorus frogs on epic journeys.

The week before last I had the opportunity to spend several days out there, tracking with beloved mentors, longtime friends, and new acquaintances brought together by our love of this mode of engagement with our world. As epic as my journey to the Kalahari was, it was a good reminder of the wonder and community to be found closer to home.

(Oh, the photo caption? This is where Frank Herbert got the idea for Dune.)

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

Current Mood: grateful

Water, Mirror, Echo, by Jeff Chang. I’m only partway through this book, but I can already tell that it’s an important read—for me personally, but also just in general. I was a student of Jesse Glover’s for around 14 years, and I knew before I met him that he’d been an early student of Bruce Lee’s. At the time I didn’t fully understand how significant that was; I’d never even seen Enter the Dragon, let alone been cognizant of Lee’s importance to martial arts in America. That his very first American student was a Black man was also something I didn’t appreciate until later. Jesse himself was fairly laconic about it unless you caught him in the right mood, with the result that Chang’s account of their meeting—a chapter I just read—is the fullest version of the story I’ve yet received. Beyond that, so far Chang’s work deserves the accolades it’s receiving; Water, Mirror, Echo is both detailed and nuanced, and situates Lee’s life and legend in a broader context of Asian American history, identity, and experience.

The Structure of Heaven and Earth: How Ancient Cosmology Shaped Everyone’s Theology, among other things, helps answer questions I’ve had for awhile about similarities I’ve noticed between the Catholic Christianity of my youth and the Hellenic polytheism I currently practice. As with so much else, much of it is due to Plato.

Eli Francovich’s commentary on a new critique of wolves’ impact on Yellowstone ecosystems is worth a read. I’d been hearing for awhile that these research findings, published in 2014 to a great deal of attention and acclaim, had been somewhat overstated—which isn’t to say that the return of wolves to Yellowstone has had no effect at all. But ecosystems are complex, as are the effects of changes in species presence and prevalence. Francovich also notes that wolves in Washington are a different matter than wolves in Yellowstone, as the wolves here live much closer to human habitation and use of the landscape. This is important because it’s directly connected to why wolves are controversial here.

This chapter on Ju/’hoansi master trackers—including #Oma Daqm, who was one of the teachers on my recent trip—collaborating on palaeo-ichnology field research is worth reading for a number of reasons, not least of which is that it describes an approach to tracking that relies less on field guides and measurements (no shade, I rely on those myself) and more on a deeply detailed and holistic understanding of one’s environment that enables a reading of tracks as easily as one might read letters. I used to wonder if some of the feats attributed to trackers in Westerns and fantasy fiction had any basis in reality. The reality is often even more impressive.

I initially had kind of mixed feelings about this trailer. On the one hand, yet another story about a white guy looking for something in Africa seems unnecessary. On the other, it’s Wernor Herzog, so it’ll definitely be interesting...and /Ui Dawid, one of the master trackers, I literally just spent a week and a half learning from. So I may have to see this.

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

Current Mood: nerdy

I should perhaps begin by saying that there are two people with this name who turn up in online searches. This post pertains to the wildlife tracker, software developer, and indigenous communities advocate, not the diamond scammer.

Now that that’s out of the way…

It’s no stretch to say that I wouldn’t have been in Namibia last month, learning tracking from Ju/’hoansi master trackers, were it not for Louis’s work, which since the 1990s has focused on the preservation of and advocacy for traditional tracking skills. The CyberTracker app and training and certification organization was born from this work, leading in turn to Tracker Certification North America as well as many opportunities to train with teachers and mentors in the U.S.

I hope to meet Louis in person someday, though he’s had some health problems in recent years. Reflecting on my own recent experiences and where this journey has taken me, I’m just grateful that he followed his own curiosity and passion all those years ago, and found connections that are still growing and branching to this day.

Current Mood: contemplative

My first tracking eval in Namibia, I don’t think I broke fifty percent.

The way CyberTracker evals work is pretty straightforward: the evaluator points out a track or sign, and you give an ID as your answer. Sometimes there are more questions: what activity or behavior is responsible for what you’re seeing; if it’s a footprint, you might have to say which foot, as well as the animal that made it. The questions have varying levels of difficulty and are scored accordingly; a harder question is worth more points if you get it right, and you lose fewer points if you get it wrong.

Last time, the ungulates got me.

A key element of tracking is knowing the possibilities. If I find hoofprints in a forest in the Pacific Northwest, it’s very unlikely to be a zebra (unless, you know, this happens). But when I was asked to assess a single-toed hoofprint on the shore of a shallow lake surrounded by tall grass in the Kalahari Desert, zebra had to be on the list of possibilities.

Two ungulate tracks, two different species. (Roan and wildebeest, in this instance.)

So did donkeys and horses, incidentally. It’s the rare location when tracking that you don’t have to consider domestic animals as well.

Similarly, in Washington State, if you find a two-toed ungulate track, you can count the number of reasonable possibilities on the fingers of one hand. On top of which, in many parts of the state, only one or two of those possibilities are going to be relevant. On my land in Thurston County, the options are deer or elk, with an outside chance of a neighbor’s goat going on a wander.

In the Nyae Nyae Conservancy, where the eval I’ve taken twice now took place, there were eight: duiker, steenbok, impala, kudu, roan, oryx, wildebeest, and giraffe.

Roan track in tricky substrate. Just as clear as in the field guides.

Discerning between these isn’t an impossible task. Giraffe feet are so large that you really aren’t going to mistake their tracks for anything else. In cases where different species have similarly sized feet—duiker and steenbok, in this instance, or roan, oryx, and wildebeest—then you have to start considering things like shape of foot, whether an animal tends to step in its own tracks or not, baseline gaits, and preferred habitats. (This is where having a wildlife biology background can come in handy, though practice and an obsession with field guides will also do the trick.)

Field guides such as this one for instance.

For my first eval in Africa, though, it was all very bewildering. Until that week I hadn’t known what a duiker was. Spending some quality time with field guides prior to the trip would have helped with that, but, well, I didn’t. This meant that I learned about the existence, behaviors, and even appearance of several species initially through their tracks. (Aardwolf was another one.) I learned that jackals have a lot in common, in terms of both tracks and behavior, with coyotes. I learned that oryxes have shorter legs relative to their body size, and therefore tend to understep when walking, so their hind feet come down short of their fronts. I learned that aardwolf tracks look a lot like hyenas’, only smaller. When I finally saw the animals that made these tracks, I could map their physical attributes to what I’d seen on the ground: the jackal’s lively trot, so like a coyote’s; the oryx’s short hind legs; aardwolves that looked a lot like hyenas, only smaller.

If I saw this in North America I’d conclude it was a small coyote.

But even my second time around, with the prior eval, several more field days with master tracker’s, and some quality time with field guides under my belt, those eight ungulates occasionally stymied me. Differences in substrate, in weather when the tracks were made, in what the weather had done since, in gait, and even in age of the animal in question were confounding factors.

Tracking isn’t just a way of knowing a landscape. Often, it also tells you how much you have left to learn.

A group of trackers in our natural environment: poring over marks in the dust.

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

Current Mood: nerdy

Back in the autumn of 2024 I flew to Namibia for the first time to take part in a Tracking the Kalahari expedition. That link has more details, but in brief, it’s a group trip to visit and stay with a Ju/’hoansi community in northeastern Namibia. The primary incentive for me was to study tracking with teachers who had been doing it for almost their entire lives, as part of a hunting protocol that, until quite recently, they relied on to feed their families and communities. If you’re a tracker, learning from these people is basically a dream come true.

TTK 2026 crew. Photo from Marcus Reynerson.

Last month, I went back and did it again. Several times during the trip, especially the four-country magical mystery tour of getting there due to the Lufthansa pilots’ strike (I’m very grateful for the heads-up about tight connections at the Addis Ababa airport), I contemplated why.

At home I try to incorporate tracking into my daily life. I go to my sit spot—not as often as I feel I should—take notice of the sign I see when out and about, pay attention when hiking or checking my trail cameras, every so often take a special trip to somewhere like the Oregon Dunes for deep-dive practice. But it’s an activity not intrinsic to my daily life, not the way it’s been to our expedition hosts until very recently. So admittedly part of the appeal is learning from people for whom tracking is an inextricable cultural element, one they are currently making considerable effort to preserve.

Master trackers KXao, #Oma, Dam, and /Ui Kunta, along with translator Cali and Marcus.

But that was just as true last time I went, so what more was I looking for this time?

Tracking is sometimes described as a form of reading the landscape. It’s a reconstruction of a story that has already occurred; that, depending on the freshness of the trail, may be ongoing. One of my principal motivations for doing it is to gain a deeper understanding of the world around me, to bridge that persistent sense of separation from what we commonly call the natural world, as though we existed separately from it.

Just lion things. Etosha National Park, Namibia. Photo from Marcus Reynerson.

We don’t, but we spend a lot of time, effort, and money living as though we do. And then, some of us spend even more time, effort, and money reconnecting. Some of us go to other continents.

That reconnection was part of what I was seeking to renew with the return journey, but it wasn’t only that. Equally important, maybe more important, was reconnecting with the community I met last time, and getting to know the people in it better. Tracking was my entrance into connecting with this community, but sustaining that connection is about other things that make us human. Where I live now, I often struggle to feel as though I’m connecting with people and the landscape around me in meaningful ways. If I can do that in a landscape unfamiliar to me, with people of a culture, language, and way of life very different from my own, maybe I can do it at home too.

So many ungulates. So many.

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

Current Mood: contemplative

I’ve just returned from Namibia, where I once again had the privilege of learning wildlife track and sign from master trackers of the Ju/’hoansi as part of the Tracking the Kalahari project. I’m still going through my photos but this is an early favorite; a quick snapshot where I accidentally got great composition and lighting.

This was my second trip and a special opportunity to deepen my connection with tracking, with the land I was visiting, and the people I met there. I’m sure I’ll have more to share in coming days.

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

Current Mood: contemplative

“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.)

Current Mood: contemplative

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.)

Current Mood: accomplished

Poachers turned rangers, complicity in tyranny, the colors of marble, bears > Bigfoot, For All Mankind

Francis Annagu’s “How Former Poachers are Protecting Nigeria’s Vanishing Rainforest” explores the lines of tension, conflict, and resolution in taking a conservation approach to a multiuse ecosystem. Buried deep in the heart of this article is one way—probably the most effective way—to turn hunters into rangers: make the latter a more attractive option, especially in terms of pay. That hasn’t answered every challenge, as agriculture and deforestation continue to press on the forest reserve. But that problem isn’t unique to Nigeria, either. Make sure you scroll far enough to see the forest elephants.

Andrea Pitzer—always worth reading—writes in “Love that is Complicit” that whatever our opinions on immigration in the U.S. (my own is that the government has been kicking the can down the road with regard to just, humane, and consistent policy for most of my lifetime), the current situation requires either looking past an awful lot of cruelty to find acceptable, or very carefully not even knowing that there’s something to look at.

In “These Marbles were Never White,” Danai Christopoulou joins a growing number of Greek commentators on the Anglophone world’s ongoing love affair with Greek mythology, in ways that often obscure that mythology’s vibrancy and cultural context. I’m no exception here, as someone who’s called myself a Hellenic polytheist for almost 15 years, and made my own contribution to the body of stories based on Greek myths and legends. Those were my entry points into a deeper appreciation for both modern and ancient Greek culture and language, but Christopoulou’s piece highlights the cost of receiving these stories stripped of their cultural, historical, and linguistic context—which is the way that those of us in the Anglophone sphere tend to receive them. When I visited Greece in 2008, the museum she describes was still under construction. Some years later I visited the British Museum, where the Elgin marbles are still on display—complete with rather defensively worded signage. Hmm.

Jeff VanderMeer’s “Double Take” is the kind of nature writing I’d love to do. Early in his piece on Bigfoot and bears, he says:

I’m zealous about the fact that we don’t need Bigfoot populating the wilderness to find the natural world mysterious and marvelous. The bears often mistaken for cryptids, for example, already exist and capture our imagination for very good reasons.

This right here is why I became a tracker. VanderMeer goes on to discuss what he’s learned about animals from the trail cameras in his yard—contrasting this with purported Bigfoot images on trail cameras in the woods and how none of them seem to reliably be the real deal. One of his interviewees for the article says that if Bigfoot enthusiasts didn’t have Bigfoot, they’d just get into some other conspiracy theory, not into actual nature. Which I think is true, and also sad.

I recently joked that I watch most movies and TV shows months to years after everyone else has already seen them, which is why I only got to the first season of “For All Mankind” in the last few weeks. It’s out on BluRay, and if you have a player, this really is an excellent way to watch it—the gorgeous visuals are shown off to their best effect. The first season takes place beginning in 1969, and they get the tech and attitudes of the period so right, I’d forget I wasn’t watching a documentary (or maybe Apollo 13) until something obviously ahistorical happened. Unfortunately it doesn’t look like the subsequent seasons will get physical disc releases anytime soon, so I may have to pony up for Apple TV if I want more stuff like this.

Current Mood: thoughtful

Andrea Pitzer, “The Century-Long Year”

Pitzer is the author of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps, which I recommend reading to anyone who wants to understand an important facet of what’s going on in the United States right now. Her newsletter and podcast are worthwhile; they mirror each other, so you can absorb this content in whichever way works best for you.

This entry is an elucidation of the idea that Trump is less a cause of the U.S.’s current situation, than a symptom. Even once he’s gone—and he will be, someday—the circumstances that put him in power will remain. If that doesn’t sound great to you, Pitzer has some advice at the end.

Bret Devereaux, “Tolkien and Éowyn Between Two Wars”

I always had this feeling that much of what happens in Lord of the Rings was in the intersections between Tolkien’s deep love and knowledge of ancient literature, his Christian faith, and his experiences in World War I. This excellent essay directly addresses two of those things, thus highlighting some key differences between battle scenes in Tolkien’s work and, say, the Iliad (which sometimes enumerates exactly which internal organs a spear impales when it kills someone).

Isaac Saul, “The ICE Shooting in Minneapolis”

There’s tons out there about the killing of Renée Good; this is probably as decent a summation as any. If you’re not familiar with Tangle, its habitual approach is to round up sources from the political left and right that are representative of what’s being said on a topic or story. Note that it does not claim that these are the most accurate reports, just the most representative. I link to this one because I think Isaac is probably saying what a lot of people are thinking right now, especially those who haven’t been anticipating (by which I mean dreading) something like this.

Something that I don’t think is getting enough attention, at least not yet, is just how quickly the Trump administration framed the entire event to suit its purposes. It’s not new for the administration to do this, but they’re getting bolder about it. (Have a look at what the official White House website says about January 6th, if you can stomach it.)

To that latter point, and how we got here, Sherrilyn Ifill’s “Whether It Is ICE or Local Police, the U.S. Has Normalised Anti-Democratic Law Enforcement Practices” is an important read. This week’s shooting is an outcome of something that’s been building for a long, long time.

David Williams, “Ten Reasons to be an Urban Naturalist”

I’ve been a subscriber to Williams’s (no relation) newsletter for awhile now, and appreciate the lens he brings to the natural world with which our cities are enmeshed. Nature’s not out there, somewhere—it’s on our streets, in our backyards, in our homes, and in us. While I can attest that seeing an elephant in its home environment (for example) is an amazing experience, so was the screech owl I spotted outside my house by following a ruckus of crows. What he calls Birding by Butt here is very similar to the practice of sit spot: go find a place to sit on a regular basis, and see what turns up. My city backyard has featured rabbits, cats, robins, raccoons, red-tailed hawks, barred owls, and one memorable season, a junco nest.

Junior Kimbrough, Bellinzonia Blues Festival 1993

I’ve been going through some CDs I haven’t listened to in awhile (and sending some off to donation), and came across a few Junior Kimbrough albums. There’s not a lot of videos of him out there, but I found this one today. This is hill country blues, similar to but distinct from Delta blues. If you like Mississippi Fred McDowell or R.L. Burnside, you’ll like this.

One of the several citizen science projects I volunteer for is the Seattle Urban Carnivore Project. One of its components is the placement of motion-activated trail cameras in and around the city to gather data about the presence of target species. (Non-carnivorous species are also recorded.) I started volunteering in part to learn how such data collection protocols work; I have cameras on my own land in Thurston County, which have recorded a number of different species, some of them domestic, and including at one point some rather startled late-night hikers.

The team I’m with currently is assigned to a camera is right next to the Green River. As you may have heard (if you’re a PNWer anyway, though I think there was some broader news coverage), we had some flooding here recently. River valleys were especially affected; while some of them do flood regularly, a combination of warmer than usual temperatures and atmospheric rivers flowing in from the Pacific Ocean made for much higher water than we typically see. A few levees, including one along the Green River, were breached.

Flooding doesn’t just displace humans, or just alter human behavior. Accordingly, when my group got ready for our January camera check, we had two major questions: one, would the camera still be functioning, or did the floodwaters reach it and render it inoperable? And two, what interesting or unusual animals might we see, if the camera had survived?

I can’t share any images because of the project specifications, but I can tell you that the camera did survive; judging by the images we retrieved, the water didn’t get quite high enough to flood it. Entirely separate from what showed up on the SD card, though, I took advantage of the large volume of sediment left behind as the floodwaters receded to do some tracking.

“Didn’t there used to be a tree there?” one of the other group members asked, and indeed, there was clear sign of beaver work:

That there should be beavers on the river wasn’t too surprising, but it was the first time I’d seen sign from them at our camera’s location. They did some work on another, larger tree as well:

More exciting was down nearer to the water, which was still running a bit high but much closer to its usual level than in previous weeks. The receding of the flood had left behind smooth washes of sediment on ground previously thick with English ivy: a perfect track trap. While my teammates investigated the camera and filled out the data sheet, I investigated the ground. Top find: otter tracks!

I don’t have photos of them, but there were also raccoon prints, and one very nice coyote track. Most of the tracks were at least a little washed out, which can complicate identification. In the case of these otter tracks, all that’s really clearly visible are the tips of the toes. A few look more like raccoon tracks, and I couldn’t swear to you that they aren’t; they can look similar, and at some point I’ll share about the trail I followed last fall that kept changing species ID until I finally reached a definitive conclusion.

Current Mood: nerdy

A few Mondays ago I woke up way too early in the Longmire Stewardship Campground at Mount Rainier, in order to meet the lead researcher for a pika counting project. The object of this research was in fact to test a protocol that could be taught to non-specialists. If it worked, volunteer citizen scientists could be deployed to pika habitats, in order to gain a clearer count of the actual numbers of this species. As a tracker who does not have an academic scientific background, I’m in somewhat of a gray area where specialization is concerned.

I do know what pikas look like, though: imagine a rabbit with mouse ears, and you’re pretty close. The first time I saw them, I was on a hike with a friend near Artist Point, near Mount Baker in the North Cascades. We were on a section of trail that ran along a talus slope, with the wide bowl of a high valley spread out below us. As we moved along the trail, a raptor soared across the valley, swooping low over the valley floor.

Cue a chorus of alarm calls, erupting from all over the talus slope: the characteristic, high-pitched “Eee!” of pikas. Before long we saw them, perching on rocks to give their alarms, then scurrying into the shelter of the rocks. Pikas are a species specialized in terms of habitat: the rocks provide shelter and passage out of sight and reach of predators, and they forage in the vegetation that grows around the talus’s edges. At the right time of day you can observe them hurrying back and forth with harvested greens bunching in their mouths, carrying the forage to their haypile larders. Pikas don’t hibernate; they store up food for the winter, when forage is scarce. Perhaps paradoxically, they also don’t function well at higher temperatures, which is why they’re endangered.

When I first heard about Pokémon I thought that Pikachu was a pika. I mean, it’s right there in the name. But the character’s design was inspired by squirrels and mice, not pikas, and the name is a combination of two Japanese words.

Pikas also aren’t rodents. Neither are rabbits, to whom they are closely related; pikas really do look like rabbits that someone stuck mouse ears on. A fairly readily perceptible distinguishing characteristic is their front teeth. Rodent teeth have high iron content, giving them a yellowish or orange appearance. While lagomorphs also have prominent front incisors, they lack this hue. They also have a somewhat different way of moving, though since pikas mostly inhabit rocky slopes, finding their actual tracks is fairly difficult.

Spotting pikas themselves, though, is pretty easy, if there are any to be found in your particular location. Youtube has plenty of videos of pikas moving about and making their distinctive vocalizations. Many of these were made at Mount Rainier, even. So if this research protocol I’m helping to test proves out, visitors to the park might have an opportunity to observe these beings for themselves, but advance research into the species and its conservation.

Current Mood: nerdy

A few years back during a conversation with a fellow tracking student, they mentioned a project they were interested in: investigating tracking in Lord of the Rings. I recently re-read the first two novels and the frequency of tracking, how it’s used to reveal plot points and character behavior as well as important details of Middle-Earth’s landscape and history, jumped out at me. Tracking doesn’t just occur occasionally in LotR; it’s a thread running through the entire story. Among other things, it underlines Aragorn’s claim to the kingship of Gondor: here is someone who knows the country he moves through with an intimacy of belonging that counters any claims of his being an outsider. It’s not as overt as his leadership against the armies of Mordor, his prowess on the battlefield, or his work in the Houses of the Healing, but it underscores his deep knowledge of the world in which he lives.

This possession of deep knowledge that informs both perception and understanding also describes Hild, Nicola Griffith’s fictionalization of real-life British saint and historical figure Hilda of Whitby. In Menewood, Griffith’s second novel featuring this protagonist, Hild is required to step out of the role created to protect her from the vicissitudes of seventh-century British dynastic conflict and into one where she must use her intellect and skill to survive, to protect her friends and allies, and to exact retribution against those who destroyed all she held dear.

Tracking plays a prominent role in this story, and not only in reading marks and signs to find out where a quarry has gone. Hild’s ability to notice, interpret, and predict rivals that of Sherlock Holmes. Whether the quarry is a deer, an intimate friend, or a sworn enemy, her method remains the same: an art of noticing that reads the stories the landscape tells, with uncanny accuracy. Though onlookers have a tendency to ascribe her abilities to witchery or divine providence, it’s clear all along that Hild’s is a human skill: honed to a rare capability, but human all the same. At one point, when she observes birds taking flight and by this predicts and mediates trouble for herself and her companions, I was reminded of a story the tracker and naturalist Jon Young likes to tell about locating a mountain lion by following bird alarms. (He was successful.)

So I want to recommend this book to all my tracking friends, but that’s not the only reason to read Menewood. Griffith has always been skilled at immersing the reader into the lives and worlds of her characters, whether they’re an exiled scion in a cyberpunkish future (Slow River), a tough-as-nails Norwegian ex-cop (The Blue Place, Stay, Always), or a government agent re-establishing contact with a colony on another planet (Ammonite). That skill was in full flower in Hild, and even more so in Menewood, as the stakes of Hild’s life and her people’s lives are raised to the highest possible. Hild’s status as something of an oracle—a godmouth, in the parlance of the novel—was always a precarious one, with the necessity of striking a fine balance between accurate foresight and telling her patron, the ambitious, cunning, but shortsighted Edwin king of Deira, what he wants to hear. That this eventually goes catastrophically wrong is itself foreseeable, and brings about one of the most vivid, difficult, and brutal parts of the novel. When Hild emerges from the disaster, it is with the recognition that she will have to step forward into the fullness of her power, leveraging all of her intelligence, discernment, physical resilience, and capacity for bringing out the capacities of others. (I found myself wishing that all middle managers were like Hild.) In roughly the novel’s first half, she’s on something of a pedestal, placed there by the ambitions and goals of others. In the second half, she stands on her own.

Other reviewers have remarked on how readers may find themselves at sea with the history, place names, and people participating in this story; many of the latter did exist, but unlike more recent episodes of British history, little is known about them. As for place names, those have mostly changed; Griffith inserts a few deliberate anachronisms to help readers along. I found myself consulting the family trees, glossary, and maps far more often than I usually do when reading the sorts of books that tend to include them. This is the kind of thing that either interferes with your enjoyment of a book, or not; I found that it didn’t in this case, and actually helped me understand some of both the political and physical landscapes of the story better than otherwise. This is perhaps in part because this is a real landscape that—climate change and modern industrial development notwithstanding—to some extent still exists today. In addition, Griffith did a lot of research into what the landscape of her story looked like back then, and it shows. Landscape affects behavior, and that’s as true for humans as it is for other animals. Even in our increasingly automated and convenient modern world, this is true; it’s definitely true for Hild and her contemporaries, who of necessity live in relationship so intimate to their land that it shapes their very natures.

That intimacy and the material reality of it is one of many immersive aspects of Menewood. I’ve read few novels where the assertion that “an army marches on its stomach” is more true and evident than in this one; a moment where Hild encourages her followers to snack on what are essentially Fruit Roll-Ups before a battle is a moment of levity and insight all rolled into one (gotta carb-load before heavy physical exertion!), and then there’s the running not-really-a-joke where she encourages them to carry eggs with them. (Frank Reynolds would approve.) That materiality and physicality is everywhere present in Menewood, even in its darkest and grimmest moments—yet balanced with a wonderful economy in Griffith’s prose. That may seem like an odd thing to say about a novel that clocks in at over 700 pages in hardcover, but it’s true: this is not a story that wallows in gory details, even though there’s gore aplenty in the battles and their aftermaths. The same selectivity of detail makes for some surprisingly strong character moments; Griffith is a master at turning a phrase, an expression, or a gesture into a communication that speaks volumes. This is as crucial in the novel’s most intimate moments as it is in its most high-stakes political negotiations. (Sometimes, those are the same thing.)

I hesitate a bit to say that those jonesing for the remaining A Song of Ice and Fire books would be well served to check out Menewood and its predecessor, but they do scratch a bit of the same itch. Okay, there’s no dragons or frozen zombies marching out of the north, but there is a wall of massive strategic importance, and the political stratagems and maneuverings eventually breaking into armed conflict are if anything more intricate and sophisticated (though the armies, once they clash, are far smaller, as befits the period). So if that’s your jam, Menewood is immensely satisfying.

There’s also far more going on in it than that comparison might imply. It's a fascinating story, richly detailed, with all the depth and complexity that make Griffith’s novels so rewarding. I hope it won’t be ten years before the next one.

Current Mood: nerdy

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rimrunner

May 2026

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Claws don't always mean canines
Every day I'm trundling, sayeth the porcupine
It's been a minute...
Dunes in the rainforest
Bruce Lee; Platonic cosmology; trophic cascades; master trackers, science, and ghost elephants
In gratitude: Louis Liebenberg
So many ungulates
Thinking about what brought me there a second time
Learning from the masters
Saving Wikipedia, IMLS Propaganda, Tracking and Seeing, Henry Mansfield, My TBR
Bear tracks
Friday five
Venezuela, Tolkien, Minneapolis, nature in the city, Junior Kimbrough
Floods and finds
Counting pikas
Reading Menewood

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