The Next Step: Interpreting Animal Tracks, Trails and Sign

By David Brown

The Next Step Interpreting Animal Tracks, Trails and Sign The Next Step is not another track identification guide. The intent of the book is to help the reader take the still image of an animal that is provided by a good track and sign identification guide and put the animal into motion in the mind's eye, embedded in its habitat and reacting to it. The book explains how to relate the various patterns of tracks in an animal's trail to the gaits that created those patterns. Furthermore, since the book seeks to unite the animal with its environment, information is included on various habitats and media in which tracks, trails and sign can be found. By combining these two elements, the reader can "see" the animal as it interacted with its environment. Included is information on the sign and behavior of species of wild animals that range widely in North America. The book concludes with a series of tracking tips useful to the reader in interpreting what he or she finds as well as a series of tracking problems for the reader to solve. The Next Step is intended for use by a wide range of readers, from the professional naturalist to the more casual nature-lover who would like to enrich his or her experience on a walk in the woods. An effort has been made to explain the complexities of animal behavior in language understandable to the layman. In effect this book enables any reader to take "the next step," after identification, into interpreting the behavior of the wild animal whose tracks, trails or sign he or she finds in forest, field and wetland. Book jacket.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1935778250
• ISBN13: 9781935778257
• Release Date: October 2015
• Publisher: McDonald and Woodward Publishing Company
• Length: 570 Pages
• Weight: 2.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.0" x 9.0"