Sharman Apt Russell's Blog

I live in southwestern New Mexico, just a few miles from the three million-acre Gila National Forest and Gila Wilderness, America’s first wilderness, designated in 1924. The animals who might call this public land their home don’t consider anything around here not their home. They travel purposefully over hills and into canyons, down the Gila River, up the Gila River, across fields, through my yard, onto my porch, and back into the trees along the irrigation ditch. Many of the tracks I find are only a few steps or a short walk away.

The humans who live on my country road are that odd mix typical of rural America. Since the 1960s, people who do not fit into mainstream society have been moving here, some staying, some not. A handful of second- and third-generation ranchers remain in this agricultural valley, although most of the water rights and land are now owned by an international mining company. As well as ranchers, a schoolteacher lives on my road, a freelance copy editor, an environmentalist with the Nature Conservancy, a retired postmaster, a retired city planner, a plumber, a writer. Perhaps half of us enjoy the skunk on the porch and the coyote in the grama grass. The other half shoot them.

Every day Michelle walks her three German shepherds down this road. Michelle is a tall striking woman with an abundance of dark hair who looks younger than she is and who carries in her straight back and muscular shoulders a certain force and energy. I don’t think she is less flawed than the rest of us but just appears so. That impression is heightened by the three large dogs who walk, unleashed, by her side.

Michelle is the mistress of these animals. She says “heel” and they stay close. She says “free” and they scatter over the undulations of prickly pear and mesquite, sniffing out holes, hoping for a cottontail or, even better, a jackrabbit.
And in this joyful world we live in, SHAZAM, sometimes there is a jackrabbit. A ripple in the space-time continuum. A flash of white. And the dogs are off!

Until Michelle calls them back. What happens next is something you don’t see every day: the dogs do come back, almost immediately, even though they would rather not. If you are me, you stare in wonder. Americans own more than eighty million dogs, and the vast majority of them would keep chasing the rabbit.

Michelle’s dogs come back because she has trained them and keeps training them. She is their family and their context. Michelle is a private person and wouldn’t want me to write too much about her, but she does have a business in which she helps other people train their dogs, too, for the benefit of everyone. This training is about confidence and consistency as a human being, about trusting and being trusted as a dog. “You have to be the best person you can be,” Michelle says.

Excerpt from What Walks This Way: Discovering the Wildlife Around Us Through Their Tracks and Signs

In our years of tracking, my friend Sonnie and I began to get a better sense of the animals who live where we live. Some of this information was for a southwestern environmental group that wanted to know about not only black bears and mountain lions but also any threatened and endangered species, such as ornate box turtles and New Mexico meadow jumping mice. In particular, Sonnie and I dreamed of finding the track of the endangered and reintroduced Mexican gray wolf, and I remember literal dreams, waking up to think this had just happened. I was in a red rock canyon with high yellow cliffs. No, I was running along a trail, watching the ground and then stopping, stopped as if someone held my arm, before that symmetrical shape and those sharp claw marks.

We dreamed of wolves but, honestly, a New Mexico meadow jumping mouse would have been as exciting. Miniaturization has such strong appeal. A perfect quarter inch mouse track is something you will never forget. You’ve really fallen into another world now, everything else so much bigger, exhilarating and frightening at the same time.

What Walks This Way: Discovering the Wildlife Around Us Through Their Tracks and Signs

Although identifying an animal’s track and sign is enormously satisfying, our feelings are obviously not reciprocated. The wild animals who leave their tracks do not care about us, except for the desire to be invisible. They want to wind secretly past my house while I am sleeping, past your house while you are sleeping. They want to be unseen, unnoticed, unloved.

A glorious exception is scat. More on that later.

The wild animals on this Earth do not want us seeing into their secret lives, and we know why. We’ve killed so many of them already. It’s not just extinction. It’s the loss of abundance. In the past fifty years, the populations of more than five thousand species of fish, reptiles, amphibians, birds, and mammals have dropped by almost 70 percent. Humans and our domesticated livestock now account for 96 percent of the weight of mammals worldwide. Wild mammals add up to 4 percent. The scientific term is defaunation. At first that word feels awkward, stilted, like marbles in the mouth. Defaunation. Then it becomes exactly right.

What Walks This Way: Discovering the Wildlife Around Us Through Their Tracks and Signs

This morning, around 8 a.m., I looked up from my office window to see a mountain lion fifteen feet away cross to the corner of the barn and disappear. This happened last Thanksgiving, too, almost a year ago. I've lived all my life in the Southwest never seeing a live mountain lion in the wild! Now I see them around my house.

When I go out to look for tracks, I'm not surprised not to find any. This resident lion has been here a while, and this very specific route crosses over difficult substrate for tracks.

Also this morning came this really nice review of What Walks This Way. https://guloinnature.com/what-walks-t...

What Walks This Way: Discovering the Wildlife Around Us Through Their Tracks and Signs

The pleasure we get in living with wild things feels pure and uncomplicated. In learning how to identify track and sign, we enjoy that democratic thrill, something almost anyone can have almost anywhere, something you can take up at almost any age or physical condition. We bend down to look, using our imagination, our mirror neurons, our reading glasses, matching marks and shapes to meaning and story. As hunters and gatherers, we depended on this skill. Perhaps that’s why books and emails are so familiar.

What Walks This Way: Discovering the Wildlife Around Us Through Their Tracks and Signs

For almost a decade I looked at wildlife tracks with my friend Sonnie, at first casually and then seriously, as we helped monitor black bears and mountain lions in New Mexico for a southwestern environmental group. Sonnie had health problems, and the pace of identifying track and sign suited her well. A slow walk, stop, bend, look. Four dainty toes, suggestion of fur, and that wavy line at the bottom of the palm pad? A gray fox passed this way. Over here: four teardrop toes, one middle toe extended past the other, palm pad more than two inches long? Mountain lion, possibly male.

This weird squiggle. Darkling beetle. A sinuous curve with smudges on either side. Some kind of lizard.

One spring day Sonnie turned to another friend with whom she was hiking, or likely strolling, musing, bird watching, and said, as I have often heard her say, “It’s so beautiful here,” before she fell to the ground. She was gone in that instant. Her memorial, long delayed because of COVID-19, featured a ravishing blue sky of cumulus clouds and a red-tailed hawk. I quoted from Aldo Leopold, a seminal environmentalist she had often quoted, too: “There are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot.”

Sonnie knew which one she was.

What Walks This Way: Discovering the Wildlife Around Us Through Their Tracks and Signs

Well, I wanted to announce my new book What Walks This Way: Discovering the Wildlife Around Us Through Their Tracks and Signs (Columbia University Press, 2024). This is a celebration of the wild animals winding secretly through our lives, past your house while you are sleeping, past my house while I am sleeping. We don’t often see them on our walks and explorations of the world because, really, they don’t want to be seen. But they leave their tracks and signs behind, and once you begin to recognize those—you feel the abundance of life around you, in city, suburb, and countryside.

As well as an introduction to the basics of wildlife tracking—with illustrations and photographs by expert tracker Kim A Cabrera—the book details the health of mammal populations in North America and is a call to reform wildlife management. Mainly, though, by the last chapter, I want a reader to look down at a track on the ground and be able to say, “Raccoon” or “Bobcat” or “Coyote” or “Pocket mouse!”

What Walks This Way: Discovering the Wildlife Around Us Through Their Tracks and Signs