A few arrows

Here are some arrows I made this week. The padded one is for practice - bopping deer on the butt before I start trying to kill them. Luckily there's no season on harassing wildlife so I'll have all year to work on it.

Hawk eats squirrel

I got back from a run the other day and sat down by the window in my room to zone out for a while. Then I started hearing a screaming animal and looked outside to see a Red-tailed hawk with a squirrel in its talons. I got to watch the hawk eat this squirrel for nearly three hours. That might seem like a long time but it was fascinating to watch something clean and devour an animal without using hands, all balanced up in a tree. Plus I had nothing better to do so I made a snack and relaxed for the show.

I think people should know that they don't have to go anywhere to reap the benefits of nature connection. Its happening all around us everywhere you look. All you have to do is look down at your own hands to see a masterpiece of evolution formed over millions of years. And to actually get to control these things is really something special.

Times that I turned invisible

I've used this line before to get kids excited for a story. You guys want to hear about times when I turned invisible? It works pretty well.

I've said in previous blog posts that I think animals are drawn to meditating humans. However I think that when that has happened to me I wasn't really meditating because I was paying attention to everything. I think when people meditate what they are really doing is tuning everything out. I like to sit in the woods and tune in.

Here are three examples of times I "turned invisible".

The first happened when I was living in Colorado. I was sitting on the intramural sports field at CSU watching the moon rise. It was a huge beautiful yellow moon coming up on the horizon. It was pretty late, probably 11 or 12 at night. As I sat there taking in the colors of the moon and the sounds of the night and feeling the wet grass on my legs I saw something bobbing out of my peripheral vision. I realized something was coming towards me but I didn't want to look over. I sat there watching the bobbing get bigger until it was right in front of me. A long legged, scrawny red fox. It came right up to my outstretched feet and started sniffing them. I sat there watching. It felt like meeting a celebrity or something. To have a truly wild animal right there sniffing my feet was awesome. After a few good sniffs it had enough and continued on its way. I watched it trot off and went back to my moonrise, totally blown away by what just happened.

One morning in New York state I went for a walk. It was early summer and the grass was all covered in dew. Up ahead on the trail I saw two baby bunnies playing. I stood very still, relaxed myself, opened up my peripheral vision and all of my senses and just waited. I knew from experience that animals are just drawn to this kind of energy. Ten or fifteen minutes later the bunnies were at my feet licking my toes and chewing on my sandals. Eventually they must have picked up my scent cause they took off in a flash all of the sudden.

Another afternoon in New Hampshire I was sitting in the backyard flint knapping. I thought this experience was interesting because I wasn't being still or quiet at all. I was banging rocks together. However my energy was the same. I had no thoughts in my head. I was totally absorbed in a peaceful state of trying to make something beautiful when I heard fluttering and felt something on my head. I waiting, wondering if that really just happened when a little tufted titmouse flew off my head, down to my feet and started hopping around.

All of these experiences are very special to me but I don't think that I'm special because I get to have them. Nature opens up to anyone willing to be patient and pay attention and no matter how long you have to wait, its always more than worth it.

Bear trailing

This is another story that I feel was a spiritual experience.

I was tracking behind my house in New Hampshire a couple months ago at the sand pit I would go to nearly every day. In all of the times I had gone there I had never seen bear tracks or heard of bears being in the area. On this particular day I decided to go check out a road that bordered the sand pit that I had never been to. On the road I found fox tracks and as I bent down to see if they were from a red or gray fox I noticed right next to them a faint but clear line of toes and a big heel pad. It was a fresh track of a small black bear. I felt a buzz in my body which I have felt many times before when I was about to have a spiritual experience. I took out my camera to get a picture of the tracks. Being in the sand pit all the time takes a toll on my camera and often when I turn it on it will read "lense error" and turn itself off. That was the case this time so as I searched up and down the road for more tracks I repeatedly turned my camera on and off over and over again praying that it would work and I would have proof that there really was a black bear in our backyard.

Miraculously the bear left no other tracks besides two or three clear ones in a line. The road was surrounded by sand which I searched with painful scrutiny for tracks but I couldn't find anything. There were deer tracks, turkey tracks, fox tracks but no bear. I slowly became obsessed with finding and following the trail of this bear so I started combing larger circles around the original set of tracks on the road. Hours passed and my circles grew to be miles. I was tracking the entire landscape in my head thinking of the most likely route for the bear to follow. I found a river that would definitely funnel the bear one way and I gained more inspiration. I found many other exciting things like the kill site where coyotes took down a deer and the feather of a red-shouldered hawk. I had never found a hawk feather before so that was really cool for me.

Eventually it started to get dark and I reached the end of the sand pit two or three miles from the road where the tracks were. My camera still refused to turn on and I finally admitted defeat. I took the lesson from this experience to be that even huge things are going on right under my nose that I don't know about. Big animals can sneak by without me ever knowing because I wouldn't even have seen those tracks if I wasn't bent over looking at fox tracks on a road that I never go to. As I turned to make the long walk back to my car I looked down and saw them. A long string of beautiful clear tracks from my bear. I had walked right over these tracks a few minutes before without seeing them. It was almost dark now but deep down I knew that if I gave it one more try, my camera would turn on. And it did- just long enough for one picture before going back to the lense error.

My first fire

When I was first learning how to make a bow drill fire it was a long and painful process. I would practice in the backyard but I would always hit a dead end and give up frustrated. I practiced nearly every day for a long time and I would learn a little more about how to make it work better each time I failed. A year went by and I felt pretty confident with bow drill despite the fact that I had never gotten a fire.

One day, after another frustrating practice session I went inside and saw a blog post about a guy who wanted to learn how to make a fire with bow drill. I read his blog and saw his pictures and criticized everything he was doing. His drill was way to skinny and his form was terrible. It was obvious that he had no idea how to do bow drill. However, after three days of practice he was able to get a fire.

I was pretty torn up about the whole thing. I had been trying for a year and I probably did know more about bow drill than this guy and yet he could get a fire and I couldn't. I left the computer and drove over to my friend's house. As I was driving and thinking about this whole thing I really got upset at myself for being so critical of this guy and then this word hit me: Arrogance. Immediately chills ran down my spine and I knew that if I went back home right then I would be able to make a fire. I didn't know why but I knew something had changed in me and that I could do it now.

The entire evening hanging out with my friends I was distracted and couldn't wait to go home and see if this was true. When I got home around 1am I went upstairs to the third floor where I would sit and practice hand drill (hand drill is more difficult than bow drill - generally people learn hand drill after they have gotten a fire with bow drill). I could practice on the third floor because there had never been any risk of me actually getting a fire. I rarely ever made smoke for that matter. Well I sat down to practice and I got a coal, blew it into fire and had to throw it out the window. I was overwhelmed with adrenaline and amazement that it actually happened. The next morning I went outside and got a bow drill fire on my first try.

This experience could be easily written off as coincidence or some little psychological thing. But to me it was magical. It felt like I was given a gift from a different world. And also a story that I can share with people as they are struggling to get their first fire.

Ropes to God: the bushman spiritual universe

I've been reading a book about Bushman spirituality and it has reminded me of my own spiritual life which I don't think should be something that I keep to myself. Even if its misunderstood or dismissed I think my own experiences were given to me with the agreement that I would pass them on to other people. So I'm going to make an attempt to share more of my "spiritual" beliefs and experiences.

Whenever I read about indigenous spirituality I see trends and similarities to stories from other native people and also nature connected people. For instance in this Bushman book they talk about the trance dances and that when they are a strong dancer they start to see lines of different colors that connect things. One of the lines connect them to the animals and they run all over the ground to different animals and when they need meat the "Big God" shows them a line to an animal and they follow it to hunt. I've heard trackers in North America talk about these lines that they follow and the feeling of being pulled along a trail of an animal even when they can't see any tracks.

There is something about all of the primitive skills that makes me feel very spiritual. The reason that I do them isn't because its fun or because I want to be an indian. It is because they make me feel like I'm growing closer to God. I don't know why they do this and it doesn't really matter to me why it makes me feel that way but it does. And all of those feelings kind of get stuck if I'm not passing on what I learn to other people. That's something the Bushmen talked about too.

My next several posts will be about some of my "spiritual" experiences. I put quotes on spiritual because I don't want my experiences to be lumped in with some other definition of spirituality. To me they are just things that happened that seem to be connected to things greater than what goes on in every day life.

Nature defined

I think humans are strange in many ways. One of the strangest things to me has to be the fact that humans (an animal on Earth) one day forgot that they were an animal on Earth. They seem to think that they stopped being like the plants and animals and rocks and became something totally different. I think it is a result of being able to make such neat things. If a bird makes a nest, the nest still looks like mud and grass which is obviously nature. But cell phones and planes don't look at all like nature. The truth is that they are natural. They are just things that an animal made. Of course an airplane doesn't biodegrade like a bird's nest does but there are lots of natural things that mess up an ecosystem if its in the wrong place.

There are some natural laws that humans ignore. But the laws are still there and these are the things that I'm most interested in tracking. Economics for example has been around long before humans. Feathers on a bird are a huge energy investment that pays off through flight. Just like the way we pay lots of money to fly places, as long as its worth it. Animals get fat just like we do if they have the same food surplus and sedentary lifestyle.

Another natural law is evolution. Evolution creates perfection. Or as close to it as possible. Once something stops evolving then its practically perfect. The bicycle for example. Its not going anywhere. Its a super efficient, fun way to travel. The evolution of computers is really cool and the evolution of our culture is very interesting to me. Its when things are restrained from evolving that I see problems occur. Religion, politics, and education come to mind. They all evolve eventually but it feels like they are treading in molasses sometimes.

All of the pure truths of the world can be found by tracking nature. This is a very comforting thing for me because society is a confusing place sometimes.

Tracking defined

I'm always trying to define just what exactly a tracker is. My best current definition is this:

A Tracker is someone who searches for the origins of things.

Tracking definitely isn't about footprints because I spend plenty of days tracking without seeing footprints. I see feeding sign, scat, trails, beds, etc. And often I'm tracking things that aren't animals. Like seeing lines made from grass or leaves blowing in the wind.

I think tracking is a essential part of being a human being and I think that the happiest people are the ones that track the most. They seem more engaged, curious and satisfied with life. Doctors track their patients, comedians track their audiences, authors track whatever they are writing about, coaches and athletes track everything about their game and so on. I think its important for people to track themselves too. I know I'm always searching for the origins of why I feel a certain way or why something is hard or easy for me. One pattern I definitely see in myself is that I'm happiest when I'm tracking nature. But I have a pretty broad definition of nature.

Update

Well I had an excellent road trip through NYC, North Carolina, a bunch of other places, topped off with a hotel stay on Bourbon street in New Orleans before we made it to Austin the next day. Many thanks to my first mate Chris Galis and our excellent gps lady, Bandy.

Next I went to San Diego and met Barry Martin who started the San Diego Tracking Team. I'm hoping to move out there in March and do some work with him. I also took another eval with Jonah Evans as our evaluator. I squeaked out the highest score with a 96. I do a lot better when I'm not attached to the outcome.

Jonah invited me to come out to Big Bend in a couple weeks and take answers for an eval out there. I'm excited for that. They have a bunch of weird animals out there.

For now I've got a moose hide that needs softening, flint that needs knapping and lots of animals that need to be tracked. Here are some pictures from San Diego: Kangaroo rat tracks, big male bobcat tracks and my moose hide.

Vermont Art of Mentoring

Well it was another powerful week at the Vermont AOM last week. Below are some pictures of the event. I'm always struck by the teens that return every year- some of them since they were little kids. They are such uninhibited, powerful people. They speak in front of the entire community with total confidence. And they are always well mannered and offering their services to the elders or little kids or anyone else that needs something. Nobody tells them to act that way, they just do it on their own. I think this is a natural result of being brought up in a loving community.

A take home line from the AOM that better shows how I believe our culture should reflect nature: Highly resilient systems have short feedback loops from highly specialized parts that keep the whole in mind.

A short feedback loop in nature happens when song bird fails to hear the other birds alarming a Cooper's hawk. But a person might say something that really hurts another person and not hear about it for years, if ever. Short feedback loops are one of the things that they really encourage at the AOM.

Blue Jay tracks


Here is my friend Jay Gardoqui playing a song he wrote on Ukulele. The lyrics are as follows Listen listen listen to the bird song
Listen listen listen to the birds
They will tell you where your enemies are
They will tell you where your predators are
They will tell you where you are
.. and back to the chorus





Oidorne point at sunrise. I love living by the ocean.

Coyote Trailin'

I've been having some wonderful full days of tracking lately. Spending so much time in nature makes me think about how many ties each organism has to everything else. The fact that one individual grass species is growing at the edge of a swamp means so many things. It speaks to the process of evolution, many years of competition forced that grass to adapt all of the necessary traits to live right there. It is tied to the soil, the climate of the area, the winds or animals necessary for seed dispersal. The lack of grazers or voles coming by to eat that blade of grass. The beavers that created the swamp which opened up sunlight and enriched the soil for that grass to grow. So many things are connected to that single clump of grass. Everything in nature is interacting and participating with everything else.

Tracking forces a person to acknowledge all of these connections and interactions. I find the way mammals shape a forest to be really cool. Squirrels dispersing acorns, moose browse altering which tree species grow where, moles aerating the soil, and so on. And then there's the way predators shape the territories of herbivores with their daily routes through the forest. And how birds and chipmunks report on all of this as its happening. Unfortunately most people don't get the joy of interacting with this incredibly complex and beautiful system. For me, tracking brings me into this system on a daily basis. I get to see many of these processes going on as well as my own impact on them. Survival treks bring a whole different level to the experience. Where tracking is fun, insightful and often profound, being in a survival situation closes the circle and makes me a total player in the system.

Yesterday we had some afternoon rain so when I went tracking in the evening, it was easy to tell the tracks that were REALLY fresh from the ones that weren't. I came across some really fresh coyote tracks and decided that I had to try and follow the trail. Trailing is very difficult but also exhilarating. After trailing an animal for even a short time I feel a real connection to that animal. Like it is a close friend and I can feel its hunger, the spring in its step, its fear of humans, etc. I was having a really fun time trailing this coyote for a couple hundred yards when the trail turned back on itself and headed into a thick brushy area. It was getting late so I decided to abandon the trail and go watch the sunset on a hill that looked over the entire area. Ten minutes later the coyote came trotting out of the brush and back along the trail that I had followed. It stopped every 20 feet or so and looked back over its shoulder like it thought it was being followed. I had a perfect view of where it was going and got to watch it trotting and loping along for several minutes. Another magical experience as a result of paying attention to the little things in nature.

The human world is so different compared to the natural world. Everything in nature has its place and makes sense. Everyone plays by the same rules and gets a fair chance at survival. When something dies, every cell gets used and is returned into the system. At some point we stepped out of that cycle and stopped following those natural laws that have worked so well for the past several billion years.

The Art of Mentoring, Ontario

I was lucky enough to be a part of the first Art of Mentoring in Toronto a couple weeks ago. It was a very educational experience for me so I want to share some of what I learned. It is hard to describe what exactly goes on at an Art of Mentoring. It is a week long workshop that has been going on for 15 years or so that was started by Jon Young.

There is a specific community that I'm a part of that has a philosophy based on nature connection and awareness and I think the Art of Mentoring was first designed to try to bring more people into that community and clarify what it is that the community stands for.

Specifically there are things that happen during the week. The entire group of 200 or so sings a lullaby to all of the children before they go to bed. The teens are honored and sent off for a 4 day survival trip. The elders are always taken care of and asked for advice. The adults sit in on lectures about nature connection then experience the games and activities that we do with the youth. They also have a day to wander the land, swim, make friction fires, play in the mud etc. Everybody gets a free pass for the week to be silly, get dirty and be themselves. Everyone is supported, complimented on their gifts, challenged on their integrity and held to their commitments.

We take hard looks at ourselves and our conduct and we look to nature for guidance when things aren't working right. One of the big points at the Art of Mentoring is that for most of our history, our culture has reflected nature and that was good. Nature works really well and we are supposed to be a part of it and work in the same way. But they don't force anything at the Art of Mentoring. Its all a big experiment. Nobody tells anyone how they should act or feel or anything. Its an invitation to try something and see if it works and if it doesn't work or feel good everyone is encourage to speak up about it and it will get changed. That way it evolves like a natural system and gets better and better.

There are ceremonies too. They are really simple and lighthearted but we do them because it feels healthy psychologically. We stand in a circle and share something we are thankful for before meals. This makes us constantly think of all of the gifts in our lives and we act more consciously as a result. We are more intentional about the things we use and the cost of where they come from. There is lots of music and celebration. Everyone is encouraged to share their own music because we think one of the special gifts of humans is that we can express beauty through art. So we're encouraged to do that a lot.

The result of doing all of this for a week for me is that I'm much more intentional about the things I say and do. I have a strong image in my head of how healthy and happy a group of people can be and I carry that around with me along with the tools I learned of how to share that in different ways. I also have a renewed passion and spirit. Like I was able to plug my soul into an outlet and fill up the battery.

There is also a lot of grief that I feel when I leave an environment like that and return to a colder world where everybody is a stranger. Its a struggle to not go up to every person I know or even people I don't know and shake them and tell them that they are sacred human beings and I want to celebrate their gifts and support them with whatever they are going through. I don't think that would go over well.

The other weird thing is that its all such common sense. Its not rocket science to realize we would all be happier and healthier if we did the things that made us happy and healthy. But as Ingwe, one of the elders of this community who has since passed aways says (in a thick south African accent) "common sense isn't so bloody common now is it?!".

We have another big Art of Mentoring in Vermont next week. A lot of people come to this one and its been going on for several years now. I'm looking forward to it and I'll let you know how it goes.

September update

High time for an update. Summer camps are complete. Four weeks of camp with White Pine and then I worked for two weeks with Johnny Pazdon and Mary Mazur who run Coyote Club in Dover, NH. It was rewarding work and I feel good about all of the connections I made with the little people this summer. Since camps ended I've been spending time in various places around New Hampshire and a week in Toronto at the first Canadian Art of Mentoring. I'm going to do a separate post about that.
I spent a week with my friend and White Pine co-worker Hillary Behr in her cutsie hometown of Tamworth, NH. She lives in black bear country just south of the White Mountains. We took a 5 day camping/backpacking trip in the Sandwich range. I climbed a mountain in flip flops and camped alone for a couple days. It was my first time to do so in a place with bears and it was a little scary.
Now I'm living in an animal house in Madbury, NH. I slept in at least 14 different places this summer so it feels good to be a little more settled for a couple months. I'm spending most of my time studying for the Specialist tracking evaluation coming up in October. After thats over I'll be driving back down to Texas and moving on to new things. Or more accurately, similar things with new people in a different place.

Here are some kids shooting freshly made bows and arrows.

Here's Hillary standing in front of her entire hometown.

This is Hillary's garden at sunrise where she grows flowers to sell at the Farmer's market.


Here is my new favorite sandpit, just down the street from my house. Following that are caterpillar tracks and Mourning dove tracks.

White Pine summer camps

We're entering our fourth week of summer camps this week. The past three weeks were the best that I've had so far in my experience working at summer camps. Hopefully we can top it off with the final upcoming week.

White Pine Programs was founded by Dan Gardoqui and Matt Wild about 10 years ago. They run very popular summer camps for kids between the ages of 7 and 14. I've been working with older boys - ages 11 to 14- in the camp titled "Bush Craft". We've been doing a lot of flint knapping, arrowhead making and stone tool work. One group was able to finish their arrowheads and make really nice arrows from blueberry shafts that we gathered in the swamp. The arrows were fletched with turkey feathers.

Last week my group was challenged to make a bowdrill kit using all natural tools. Most of the time bowdrill kits are carved with knives and they string is a shoelace or nylon cord. Its much more challenging to use just what is found in nature. We used white pine for the kit and a fresh hemlock rootlet for the cord and we used chert rocks that I had brought up from Texas. We had great success with this kit and got a fire on the second day of the challenge.

Here are some pictures of White Pine, the nature museum/classroom and our bowdrill kit:

Cyber Tracker Evaluation

We had the real evaluation this past weekend led by George Leoniak. What an experience! It's a real treat to get to see what a master tracker sees when he's in the woods. Besides being evaluated on your own tracking abilities, the tracking evaluations are the best two day tracking workshops that I know of. Anyone that has an interest in wildlife or ecology should definitely try to volunteer at or participate in an eval. Its a pretty awesome experience.

I was a little nervous going into the first day and I over thought some tracks that I should have gotten right but the second day I only missed one and I got one bonus so it balanced out. I ended up with a 93% and a Level 3 certification. My name is on a website which is cool too: http://wildlifetrackers.com/evals/qualified_trackers/

Despite what the Dans told us, the real eval was much more difficult than the practice one. There used to be 40% easy questions on the evals but now they've changed it to be 25% easy questions, 25% medium, and 50% difficult questions to simulate a specialist eval where people are trying to get a 100%.

I'll share with you some of the more difficult (and more interesting) questions.

We had many Coyote vs. Dog questions. These are some of the trickiest questions because there are a lot of lean, fit dogs out there. One major clue is the size differentiation between the front and hind feet. Coyotes have larger front feet than hind feet and in dogs this is less obvious.

We had beaver stripping on a hemlock tree which I thought was porcupine since they eat hemlock bark. I didn't know that beavers will go around to all the conifers near their pond and strip a ring around the base in order to kill the tree and allow trees with more nutritious bark like maples and poplars to grow in.

There was a hole in a tree with a half eaten acorn in it. The two questions were: 1. who made the hole in the tree? and 2. Who ate the acorn? I correctly guessed that a Pileated Woodpecker made the hole but I called the acorn feeding flying squirrel sign. It was actually mouse sign which could only have been known by a little scat buried back in the hole.

We had a partial track in the mud where only the bottom edge of a heel pad was showing. I called it a Gray fox but it was Actually Bobcat. The lower part of the heel pads of these two are very similar but there are little differences that I didn't pick up on.

There was a really cool site of two little jaw bones, a weird elongated scat and little tufts of gray hair. The questions where "who's scat is this and why does it look this way?". It looked weird because the scat was still in an intestine when it was left there and it was known to be a gray squirrel by the jaw bones and hair.

Another neat question was the end of a fallen tree that was about 12 feet up in the air and had beaver chew on the tip. The question was "who did this and why is it so high?". The answer was that before the beaver chewed the tip of the tree off it was laying on the ground, then after it was chewed off the balance changed and the end of the tree went up.

One more question that I liked was on a set of bobcat tracks and the question was whether it was a male or female. I guessed female because it seemed small but it was actually male because of distinctive things in the heel pad and toes.

Pictures:

Turkey dust bath

Bobcat scat and scrape (look closely for a track near the bottom of the scat)

Giant toad scat

Jumping mouse tracks

My certificate:

Tracking Apprenticeship Complete

The 9 month White Pine Tracking Apprenticeship had its last meeting this past weekend. It was an amazing learning experience. We completed the journey with a mock evaluation, simulating the Cybertracker evaluations, except the Dans say ours was a bit harder. We also did some really cool bear sign tracking and we got to hear people's presentations of their projects that they chose for the course.

I'm sad its over but I feel great about meeting all of my goals in this apprenticeship. I'm pretty sure I learned as much as I possibly could have. I completed all of the journals, met all of my project goals, and scored 98% on the evaluation - best in the class. The real evaluation is coming up in a couple weeks so hopefully I can carry my momentum onward and score well on that one.

Check out this sweet short-tailed weasel track. D'Arcy and I found this track under I-95 in Portsmouth, NH.

Here is some of the intense black bear sign that we found this weekend. A territorial male just smashed this living maple in half.

Here is another tree destroyed by territorial bears. They bite and scratch sap trees (Red Pine is a favorite) until it looks like this.

Here is an example of an eval question. It was actually three questions: 1. what animal made this track (in the big circle)? 2. Which gait is is using? 3. Which foot is this (little circle)?

This one I got wrong but I'm ok with that... its a toughy. Answers:

1. Frog (I said toad)

2. Hop (other options are bound, gallop, lope, trot, walk)

3. Hind right.

Bear tracking

D'Arcy and I drove up to the White Mountains this past weekend to a spot where we were told there were bear tracks. I have only seen bear tracks once before in New Mexico on a Boyscout trip so it was good to see them again. I have often heard bears, mountain lions, and wolves referred to as the Sexy Megafauna. This is sort of a joking term used to poke at the fact that land managers give an unproportional amount of attention to these exciting animals and overlook how important something like moles, for example, might be to an ecosystem. I however, love tracking the Sexy Megafauna. Here are some pictures. We also found some very nice Mink and Beaver tracks.

Having found and journaled black bear tracks, I only have one species left (Ruffed Grouse) for the advanced completion certificate of the White Pine Tracking Apprenticeship. Here are the ones I've journaled: Virginia Opossum, Eastern Coyote, Red Fox, Gray Fox, Domestic Dog, Black Bear, Raccoon, River Otter, American Mink, Bobcat, Domestic Cat, White-Tailed Deer, Moose, Beaver, Groundhog, Muskrat, Porcupine, Snowshoe Hare, Cottontail, Red Squirrel, Grey Squirrel, Chipmunk, Mouse, Meadow Vole, Mole, Shrew, Wild Turkey, Great Blue Heron, Mourning Dove, Rock Dove, Robin, Sparrow, Crow, Raven, Frog, Toad, Striped Skunk and Canada Lynx.

"Nature does not stagnate. It is a flowing river. We seek to ride down this river. To surrender to its speed and direction. We do not want to hold our position, standing in or wading across the river. Or worse, to deny its existence. For where the river of nature flows, also flows the river of spirit." -anonymous tracker