Product Description

Animal tracks in the snow of the mountain forest, in the mud along a streambank, or in the sand of the desert are much more than footprints. James Halfpenny’s Field Guide will allow the nature lover to satisfy his or her curiosity by identifying the animal that left the prints. But identification is only the beginning of a fascinating activity: interpretation is the rewarding goal of this book. With it anyone can be a nature detective, able to reconstruct the behavior of mammals from mice to moose. Tracks tell stories and the user of this book can read them. Based on field research, much of it the author’s own, the book brings the amateur naturalist the latest information on animal gaits and the interpretation of scat.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #197092 in Books
• Published on: 1986-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 176 pages

Review
"…quite simply the best book ever written on the subject." -- Mother Earth News

About the Author
Dr. James Halfpenny, founder of A Naturalist’s World, is a former research associate at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, University of Colorado at Boulder. He was an instructor at the National Outdoor Leadership School and served as director of the Mountain Research Station. He has taught tracking since 1967.

Elizabeth Biesiot is the artist/designer for the Denver Public Library. She received a BFA from Bowling Green State University and has had a lifelong interest in natural history. She lives in Denver.

Customer Reviews

I highly recommend this book to all trackers and naturalists
This book has so much information about tracking that it will take a while to digest it all. The gait descriptions are thoroughly explained. Finer points of tracking and how to see tracks are well-defined. Explanations are written clearly and amply illustrated to make learning easier. This guide shows you how to identify not only the tracks, but the patterns and other signs left behind by animals. I have an extensive collection of books on tracking and I rate this one among the top three.

Best Tracking Book I Know Of
I've read a number of tracking books and this one is the best. Easy to follow. Sensible. Lots on gait patterns and scats. James tells you what he knows and is careful not to pretend to know more than he does.

Written for the detective in you
Animal tracks are more than just impressions in the snow, mud, or dirt. They are a record of what an animal was doing, where it was going, and what it was thinking... IF you know how to read them.

Jim Halfpenny has spent most of his life following, recording, and interpreting the elusive tracks of animals. This book focuses on mammals.

Now there are a number of books on bird and mammal tracks. A Field Guide to Mammal Tracking in North America is much more than a collection of diagrams. This book:

* discusses the anatomy and behavior behind tracks

* develops a rationale on how to look at and measure a track

* revels the differences between a gait, a step, a jump, and a straddle

* discusses tracking techniques (Halfpenny gives seminars on this topic, and it is included as Chapter 4 in this book)

* reviews track characteristics of canids, felids, lagomorphs, ungulates, and rodents, along with bears, weasels, raccoons, opossums, and shrews.

* discusses "scatology"

* presents a number of interesting cases that he then works through to show the reader how to approach a mystery track and identify the animal, and its behavior, correctly.

This is not a very expensive book. It could have been even less expensive with the elimination of the 12 full-page color illustrations of selected mammals in the center of the book. They were nice, but distracting, and most of the drawings don't even have pictures of tracks, the point of the book!

This book would have been improved with use of a digital camera in capturing images of tracks. However, Halfpenny has been collecting them his whole life, certainly prior to the common use of this technique! This is a "must have" book for the serious tracker.... a bargain through and through.