Cat Tracking and a wildlife bonanza

I’ve been hiking the plateau for several days now and, wow, what a lot of wildlife activity is going on there.  A few days ago on my first jaunt I ran into a fairly fresh elk carcass.  She was a very large and old elk.  I’d been seeing lots of wolf tracks on the plateau [...]

Cracking the Egg

This is an blog entry from a new guest writer, Richard Vacha, head of Marin County Tracking Club.  I am happy to have Richard as an occasional contributor. To the early Apaches, Tracking and Awareness were the same word. This has taken me quite a while to really understand. Though certainly there are times in [...]

Marin Tracking Club 2

I’m in California for the holidays and went to the Marin Tracking club this morning. I used to go regularly when I lived here.  Then it was small and just beginning.  Now the word is out and there were four times the amount of people.  The tracking club meets on the last Sunday of every [...]

Trapping

I am not an ‘animal rights activist’, but I find the business of trapping for fur/money disgusting.  Hunting or trapping for food and survival is one thing. Hunting for trophy and trapping for the almighty dollar disregards not the ‘rights’ of an animal, but the fact that animals are conscious beings, not just some commodity. [...]

A brilliant and frigid day

Its -14 degrees tonight at only 7 pm.  Today it was a clear beautiful day and the mercury never got above -1 degrees F.  I got bundled up and went out for a ski, but my new skis have a big problem with their bindings.  I tried for 20 minutes and never got my shoes [...]

Learning gaits

I’ve been working hard to learn animal gaits.  What, you may ask, is that?  Its the pattern you’re going to see on the ground when an animal is moving, either walking, running, loping, trotting, hopping…you get the idea. I’d been studying track identification for a number of years.  When I was in California last month [...]

Mystery of the Cache

Several weeks ago I wrote in my post about planting seedling trees that I accidentally dug up a cache of clean red fresh chunks of meat.  I’d noticed a freshly dug area right by a rock and thought it would be easier to plant there.  To my surprise out came about 4 or 5 pieces [...]

Bear tracking

According to an article I read, the GYE has 1.1 Grizzly Bears per 100 square kilometers (38.6 sq. miles).  I’m not sure how many bears live in the Sunlight area of Cody, but I know its a drop-off place for problem bears.  I was told by a Forest Service contract employee last summer that they [...]

The ancient footprints–Dinosaurs

Yesterday I went with some friends to see the Dinosaur footprints at Red Gulch/Alkali.  Located on BLM land outside of Shell, WY,  its about an hour from Cody towards Greybull.  The turnoff is a good dirt road that goes about 35 miles and ends in Hyattville, where there’s an archeological site with petroglyphs.  Today we [...]

The wolves have a good day

What a day!  Let’s begin with 4″ of fresh snow.  Then add 5 wolves running past my property, 4 greys and 1 black.    Throw in back tracking and tracking the wolves to explore what route they are using to come down into the valley.  And for the day’s finale, watching the wolves on two kills [...]