Pikes Peak Region Trail Finder

Expert tracker "Uncle Chad" teaching my two sons to track.

Animal tracking?

Before the rise of urban life, kids spent a lot of time learning “read” the visual clues left behind by other animals.

Nowadays, many kids never get to learn the art of tracking.

But maybe they should.

Tracking gets kids outdoors and interested in wildlife. It may also provide kids with opportunities to practice scientific reasoning, spatial skills, and symbolic thought.

Animal tracking in anthropological perspective

If you live in the urban world, you might not do much tracking.

But for some people, tracking animals--and reading the visual clues they leave behind--are a crucial part of daily life. 

In the Western Desert of Australia, hunter-gatherer children as young as five years old track lizards and birds (Bird and Bird 2004).

Boys in the Kalahari must learn how to track prey for hours at a time, because large, fleet-footed prey animals usually escape the first attack. Typically, hunters shoot prey with poisoned arrows and then follow the weakened animals until they finally collapse (Liebenberg 2008).

This “persistence hunting”—which may have been widespread among early human foragers—requires subtle detective work.

Wounded prey animals are frequently out of visual range. To avoid losing the trail, hunters must make careful observations of the environment and make inferences about past events.

Such detective work is useful in other contexts besides hunting.

For most of human history, children’s daily lives probably resembled those of modern-day hunter-gatherers. Kids spent their days outdoors, paying close attention to the behavior of other animals. They participated in foraging. They learned to hunt small game, steal eggs, and find edible insects. They learned to track.

In fact, archaelogist Steven Mithen has proposed that Upper Paleolithic art functioned, in part, to teach children about tracks, hoof-prints, and other animal signs important for hunting (Mithen 1988). For example, many European cave paintings depict animals with their feet unnaturally twisted, so that the feet are drawn as you would see them in tracks (Guthrie 1984).

So it’s interesting to consider: What have we lost? Urbanized parents often worry that their kids spend too much time playing electronic games or watching television. We worry that our kids have overly short attention spans. We want our kids to go outside, to get more exercise. We want to encourage our kids to be active, to think critically, and discover an enthusiasm for science.

It seems to me that animal tracking addresses all of these concerns. Tracking takes kids outside. It gives them reason to move their bodies and pay close attention to their environment.

And tracking is an intellectual exercise, too.

Source ParentingScience.com