Wilderness Volunteers Blog: A Brief Introduction to Animal Track Identification

Wednesday, August 17, 2016

A Brief Introduction to Animal Track Identification

Have you ever been in the backcountry and run across an interesting animal track that you wish you could identify? With some instruction, a few careful observations and maybe a couple of measurements you can likely identify what animal left the track in question and gain some insight about wildlife in the area you are visiting.

Tips:

Look for tracks in wet and sandy places like stream beds, beaches, or sand dunes. Snow also is a great place to find tracks.
Good quality impressions make it much easier to decipher tracks.
Look at gait (an animals manner of walking) clues when you can. An animals gait can help you narrow down the range of possibilities.

Try to pick out identifying characteristics (how many toes, are there claw impressions, etc.)
A flashlight held at an oblique angle can help bring out details in a track.
Size can often be a defining feature.
Take along a notepad to sketch tracks and relevant observations/measurements.
Animals like bears, skunk, beaver, opossum, badger, raccoon, weasel and otters have five toes on both front and rear feet.
Members of both the Felidae (cat) and Canidae (dog) family have four toes on the front and rear feet.
Claws are typically visible on prints from members of the Canidae family (wolves, coyotes, foxes, dogs, etc.).
Claws are typically not visible on prints from members of the Felidae family (mountain lion, bobcats, lynx, house cats, etc.) due to their retractable claws.
Rodents such as mice, squirrels, prairie dogs, marmots, muskrat, chipmunks and porcupines have four toes on the front and five toes on their hind feet.
Deer, reindeer, elk, antelope, mountain goat, bighorn sheep, wild boar and moose have two toes.
Raccoon prints have long toes and resemble tiny human hands/feet.
Opossum prints have the front fingers spread very widely and rear print has a distinctive thumb-like toe.
Beaver have large webbed hind foot prints.
To differentiate black bear tracks from brown bear tracks:

#1 find the lowest point of the outside (largest) toe
#2 find the highest point on the front edge of the palm pad
#3 draw a line through the two points and extend across the track. If more than half of the smallest toe is above the line, the print is from a brown bear. If more than half is below the line, the print is from a black bear.

Bird tracks can be classified as follows:

Anisodactyl tracks/ perching birds: 3 toes pointing forward and one long toe pointing backward. (eagles, ravens, hawks, doves, vultures, herons, etc.)
Game bird/ ground birds: 3 toes pointing forward with short/absent toe pointing backward. (turkey, quail, pheasant, ptarmigan, partridge, coots, cranes, grouse, etc.)
Palmate tracks/ water birds: 3 webbed toes (ducks, geese, gulls, terns, etc)
Totipalmate tracks/ ocean birds: 4 webbed toes (pelicans, gannets, boobies, cormorants, etc.)
Zygodactyl tracks: 2 toes pointing forward & 2 toes pointing backward (woodpeckers, roadrunners, parrots, owls, osprey, etc.)

click image for larger view

(please note tracks are not to scale)