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The Scouting Guide to Tracking: An Officially-Licensed Book of the Boy Scouts of America: Essential Skills for Identifying and Trailing Animals
In Scouting’s Guide to Tracking, current Scouts, Scout alumni, and readers interested in the outdoors are provided with time-tested advice on how to track big and small animals over different types of terrain. Some practical tips How to determine the age of tracks in any circumstanceHow to recognize the distinctive marks of dozens of different speciesHow to track in desert, forest, snow, and grassy areasHow to identify instances when an animal has circled around or backtrackedStalking techniques such as cold hunting, camouflaging, and using the stump methodHow time and weather affect signsAnd so much more! Since 1910, the Boy Scouts of America has helped build the future leaders of this country by combining educational activities and lifelong values with fun. The BSA is committed to training youth in responsible citizenship, character development, and self-reliance through participation in a wide range of outdoor activities.
354 pages, Kindle Edition
Published January 7, 2020
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March 5, 2020
As a tracker and tracking enthusiast, I was excited to see a new Boy Scouts of America guide to tracking. Recent guides to tracking by authors such as Mark Elbroch & David Moskowitz have brought a new standard to the genre. With accurate, highly detailed illustrations and well researched text backed by decades of experience in the field these recent guide books offers excellent resources for students of wildlife tracking. Unfortunately, this book falls far short of this modern standard. The text is riddled errors and misinformation, and seems to contain about as much folklore as fact. The illustrations are poor quality, where they exist at all. I am sorry to say that this guide is one of the lowest quality books about wildlife tracking I have ever seen. A few of the many problems include:
• Several photographs of tracks and animals are misidentified. The photographs of “cougar” tracks on page 109 are actually the tracks of a large domestic dog, as are the “coyote” tracks on 94. The photograph of a “gray squirrel” on page 141 is actually a photograph of a California ground squirrel. Many other photographs are of such poor quality that I cannot tell if they are accurate or not.
• The illustrations and descriptions of basic animal gaits and the resulting track patterns are almost entirely wrong. A photograph on page 137 claiming to be “The track pattern of a raccoon running flat out over hardpack snow” is fact a picture of two separate raccoon walking trails that happen to be side-by-side. Illustrations of trail patterns throughout the text often show arrangements of tracks that would be impossible for any animal to produce.
• Many species accounts do not include clear illustrations of the tracks, and some include no track images of any kind. Some of the few track illustrations included are poor quality copies of older works. The red fox track illustration on page 103 and the gray squirrel track illustration on page 143 are both obvious, though poor, copies of Olaus Murie's illustrations from his seminal “Peterson Field Guide to Animal Tracks,” which is still in print and still under copyright. Numerous photographs are used without proper attribution.
• Several other photographs are used multiple times, claiming to show different things. A photograph on page 55 which is said to be moose scat also appears on page 63 labeled as whitetail deer scat. A photograph on page 46 claiming to show the obvious heel strike of a boot in dense forest litter appears again on the facing page labeled as the track of a person “purposely walking with most of the body weight forward on the toes, to make as little contact with the earth as possible.”
• Most of the information about following animal trails is essentially useless. Half of the section on tracking in forest humus is dedicated to using the broken stems of bracken ferns to “not only reveal [an animal's] passage, but which direction it was traveling.” In my hundreds of hours of trailing whitetail deer through forest humus I have never found a broken bracken fern stem that guided me along the trail.
• The book seems to completely forget its claimed audience—Boy Scouts. It suggests that readers head into the filed with a long list of “equipment that has proved to be essential [to] getting to know wildlife while in the field.” The list includes binoculars, a digital camera, a microscope, a GPS, a belt knife with a 5” blade, a multi-tool, and four to five pairs disposable medical or food service gloves. All so a teenager can walk outside and look at footprints? Later, the author advises a young scout who might need to follow a wounded animal while hunting to “pour yourself a cup of coffee” and wait 10 minutes.
With all of the quality resources and guides now available in the field of wildlife tracking, The Boy Scouts of America should be embarrassed to have their name associated with this poor quality publication.
• Several photographs of tracks and animals are misidentified. The photographs of “cougar” tracks on page 109 are actually the tracks of a large domestic dog, as are the “coyote” tracks on 94. The photograph of a “gray squirrel” on page 141 is actually a photograph of a California ground squirrel. Many other photographs are of such poor quality that I cannot tell if they are accurate or not.
• The illustrations and descriptions of basic animal gaits and the resulting track patterns are almost entirely wrong. A photograph on page 137 claiming to be “The track pattern of a raccoon running flat out over hardpack snow” is fact a picture of two separate raccoon walking trails that happen to be side-by-side. Illustrations of trail patterns throughout the text often show arrangements of tracks that would be impossible for any animal to produce.
• Many species accounts do not include clear illustrations of the tracks, and some include no track images of any kind. Some of the few track illustrations included are poor quality copies of older works. The red fox track illustration on page 103 and the gray squirrel track illustration on page 143 are both obvious, though poor, copies of Olaus Murie's illustrations from his seminal “Peterson Field Guide to Animal Tracks,” which is still in print and still under copyright. Numerous photographs are used without proper attribution.
• Several other photographs are used multiple times, claiming to show different things. A photograph on page 55 which is said to be moose scat also appears on page 63 labeled as whitetail deer scat. A photograph on page 46 claiming to show the obvious heel strike of a boot in dense forest litter appears again on the facing page labeled as the track of a person “purposely walking with most of the body weight forward on the toes, to make as little contact with the earth as possible.”
• Most of the information about following animal trails is essentially useless. Half of the section on tracking in forest humus is dedicated to using the broken stems of bracken ferns to “not only reveal [an animal's] passage, but which direction it was traveling.” In my hundreds of hours of trailing whitetail deer through forest humus I have never found a broken bracken fern stem that guided me along the trail.
• The book seems to completely forget its claimed audience—Boy Scouts. It suggests that readers head into the filed with a long list of “equipment that has proved to be essential [to] getting to know wildlife while in the field.” The list includes binoculars, a digital camera, a microscope, a GPS, a belt knife with a 5” blade, a multi-tool, and four to five pairs disposable medical or food service gloves. All so a teenager can walk outside and look at footprints? Later, the author advises a young scout who might need to follow a wounded animal while hunting to “pour yourself a cup of coffee” and wait 10 minutes.
With all of the quality resources and guides now available in the field of wildlife tracking, The Boy Scouts of America should be embarrassed to have their name associated with this poor quality publication.
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