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.