Lions & Trackers & Boars

Oh my! This was an awesomely epic Native Eyes class.

Here, before I launch into my account, is a beautiful example of a deer lay. Can you see the two forelegs in the front, and the arch of the back behind them? Scroll down to the end of this post to have a look at my interpretation of this sign.


On this first week back from winter break, we met down south at Venture. We gathered, built our fire, heard stories of the break, received our assignment for the next day, and ate good food.

We rose early the next morning for a tracking day at Cloverdale Ranch, and piled into cars and vans. Finally we gathered in our clans near the reservoir at Cloverdale, ready to fulfill our Native Eyes assignment of looking for and encouraging curiosity about scat!

Let me take a minute to explain the clan system. The clans are the Tule Elk, the Grizzlies, and the Bald Eagles. These clans include students from each of our school’s three main programs: the RDNA fundamentals program, the Cultural Mentoring program, and the Native Eyes program. Each clan is also made up of representatives from each of our school’s eight directional societies, starting with the East Society and continuing sunwise around the compass to the Northeast Society. (Native Eyes, appropriately enough, is also the school’s Northeast Society, responsible for encouraging full sensory awareness, the questioning process, and thankfulness among other things.) We use these various groupings (program, clan, and society) to organize ourselves in various activities. The three programs each have different learning focuses, and the eight societies each have different jobs and roles in our larger groups. When we have school-wide activities, such as our epic wandering tracking day in Cloverdale, we usually organize into Clans in order to have people from each program and each society working together in one group throughout the activity.

Yes it sounds complicated, and yes it was originally very confusing, but now we’ve all lived this organizational system long enough to work with it fairly smoothly. Regardless of the coherence (or lack thereof) of my explanation, we spent the day in our Clans.

My group, the Bald Eagles, couldn’t decide where to go. After much finagling and negotiation, we finally agreed to drive out to the second gate and explore some of the southern part of the reserve.

We climbed up to the ridge and the first thing we noticed were numerous spots covered with little furry scats, sometimes including little bones or bone shards, each less than an inch in diameter and probably an average of six or seven inches long in total, shaped like slightly larger versions of the contents of a well-used cat litter box. They were all dense and many were weathered to a chalky white. The entire landscape was littered with these scat piles, bespeaking the incredible density of the bobcat population in these coastal prairie lands.

Over the ridge crest on the bank of a vernal pool, we found a wide churned-up and soupy section of mud. Preserved in the muck were these (and many other) impressively-sized marks. I've adjusted the levels and contrast on these photos so that fine details pop out better.



From round rear to cloven toe, the hair-imprinted smoosh was a little less than three feet long. A series of blunt, dewclawed trotter tracks led away from the body print in a short-striding trail. The trail was crossed by deer tracks, which you can also see in the photo and which serve as size comparison. The sharpness of the tracks and fine detail of hair and hoof texture melted away as we watched, flowing back into the pond under the days’ steady drizzle.









We discussed and argued the story of this spot for a long time before moving on. When we were ready we continued along the ridgetop, walking game trails at the edges of brushy ravines. Up on the plateu, near a worn-in deer run, I nearly stepped on our second major find of the day.



A clump of fur lay in the grass. I bent down and looked closer, and the clump resolved into a 1.5-inch diameter log, composed almost entirely of coarse hollow-shafted dark-and-light ticked hairs. In all the scat was more than 7 inches long, and probably closer to 9. The shape was blocky and clumpy overall, and very dense, though it was old enough to have a green bloom of algae on some edges.



After logging the big scat in Cybertracker, we continued on the game trail. We found a series of large piles of dead grass near another thick furry scat. One of the piles still reeked of cat urine. We also found miniature variations on the furry-scat-near-dead-grass-pile theme, possibly territorial markings by bobcats. The big piles and scats were so much larger than these smaller, commoner examples, that we were fairly convinced that the culprit had to be a much larger cat.



I’d started the day with a personal wish to find and learn about boar and cougar sign. These are two large and important animals of California wildlands that I’ve never before had the opportunity to track. We finished the day wet and tired from the long rainy walk, but though my limbs felt leaden I returned to camp energized.

And here again is that deer lay: