Ask Permission

We started the week out on the beach, following coyote trails as they came together, dug, scented, and parted. We examined their patterns at length and wondered why their gaits, trajectories, and points of interest varied so widely. With few answers, we headed back to our sit meadow for more tracking of the landscape.


At the meadow, we dove past the poison oak periphery and into the wooded ravine. we found a wide trail, fluffed up like a freshly used deer trail but not cut into the earth, with very large compressions. Human boot prints? Wild pig?


That evening around the fire we told the stories of the beach and the ravine, and received a challenge. Could we see the coyotes that cavorted on the beach? We decided to rise at 3:00 AM and find out. Toting sleeping bags, blankets, coffee and binocs, we paused at the trailhead down to the beach to admire the moon on the water, to give thanks for the coming day and the animals we were tracking, and to become present to our senses and to the moment. We settled into our spots and waited.


When the sun crested the Coast Ranges and spilled light onto the sand, we still had not seen another mammalian visitor on the beach. We climbed out of dune and bluff to investigate the trails anyway. We only found one coyote trail that morning, it's patterns very different from the cavorting we'd seen the day before. Was he nervously looking over his shoulder? What kept stopping him in his crisp direct register trot and drawing his gaze away from the direction of travel?

This coyote trail had already been laid down when we arrived. The tracks lead down to the beach, where they're washed away near the high tide mark. Our arrival was considerably later than high tide.



But up the beach, the cavorting had continued. They simply avoided our stakeout, and kept up their digging and romping further north. When we related the story to Jon Young, he laughed and said simply "You got served! Did you remember to ask permission?" We had not remembered.

Bedding Down

As soon as we arrived we began trailing deer at Commonweal, searching for the freshest trails, hunting for them in their day beds. We spread out in ones, twos and fours over the landscape. Some took the ridges where, before the rains, the bucks were most often bedded down.

One pair, youth and adult, wandered the east ridge seemingly aimlessly. They would stop, close their eyes, point in a direction, walk that way, and then stop again and do the whole thing over. They zigzagged without pattern over the landscape as they tried to feel the location of the deer's beds. After a long time of wandering and thinking about deer the youth stopped. "I was feeling it in my brain," he said, "but now I feel it right here." He pointed to his gut, and to the direction from which the feeling came. Walking that way, the pair found themselves walking right up to a single worn-in deer bed. It was full of deer hair.

Others went low into the valley. Those on the ridges found little, only a few beds. They came back to stories from the others of the low places filled with deer, more than 20 in the bird sit meadow alone. We'll know where to go next time.


After sharing stories of our wanders we took the last few hours of sunlight to attempt individual fires off the land, with no prep and in the wake of much rain, within the hour. Smoke billowed from bowdrills rigged with shoelaces or pine roots, but no coals came. We finally used a previously harvested elderberry and cedar hand drill kit to make the evening's fire before the sun set and the fog came up .


That evening Jon Young joined us in the shelter for stories around the fire. He talked about tracking and body radar, told stories about trailing tigers, and related his experiences with the hazards of learning tracking too quickly. Unraveling, he called it -- specifically, the unraveling of one's "truths" about the world, false hopes, baseless beliefs, and dearly-held identities. Just like that Weezer song: "if you want to destroy my sweater, hold this thread as I walk away..."

Jon went on to mention a practice he called anchoring, in which two women and two men 10 years older, and one woman and one man 20 years older, commit to supporting a young tracker on their learning journey. He said that anchors can help ease this unraveling process that tracking and nature connection precipitates.

...

The next day, we launched into tracking at Abbott's Lagoon. Some of us were practicing the Honoring Routine on the way and as if to test our patience the way was well guarded by little brown birds. We walked slow, stopped where they were feeding, and went around them. This little one stayed feeding at the edge of the path as our whole group detoured in a four-foot-radius arc around him.


We arrived at the first tracking station. Barefoot human, bobcat, deer, skunk, sparrow, and worm tracks were all crisply evident, and older coyote and human shoe prints lay under a patina of rain and weather. Skunk and cat tracks fell over the otherwise crisp-looking barefoot human tracks. Some of the tracks had been washed away, or filled in with sediment, by water flowing over the land after the rain. But none of the crisp-looking ones had any raindrops in them.

We asked many questions at first, and came up with many more by the end. Who had been hopping, or running in step with a partner behind them, up the path a day ago? What would prompt a human to do either of those odd things? We tried many ways to reproduce the barefoot gait, but still had more questions. Was it a small man or a woman? When were they here? Could we tell the sexes of the other animals? When had they passed? What mood had they been in?


After a short midday lunchbreak and wander to shake of any residual focus-lock, we went trailing again. Our assignment: to trail (or backtrail) the freshest deer trail across the dunes to it's most recent bed.



We started on a clear trail but lost it in windswept flats. We then tried the youth's body radar technique. We wandered for a bit, found a worn deer trail into dunegrass, and found some beds that had not been slept in since the last rain a few days ago (until we got there). Though the beds were at the tops of dunes and were windswept from a human perspective, the grass sheltered and sun warmed beds were lovely at the level of sleeping deer.


We pointed and followed our brain-borne ideas some more, then something seemed to shift. Two of our party had strong unity on their direction, and seemed to feel differently about that direction than before.


We beelined to a brush-covered hillside where the bare ovals between the brush were full of chocolate-chip deer turds. We examined them for hairs, and found quite a few. We also found that quite a few ticks began creeping up our legs whenever we stopped, and that what looked like coyotebrush was actually a clever disguise for tendrils of poison oak popping out everywhere. Ticks and profusely budding (and browsed) poison oak were enough evidence for us of recent deer habitation. Without taking the time to find fresh tracks we hightailed it out of there, picking ticks as we clambered down the dune.


The evening sun stretched over the land and told us it was time to come in.


After sharing stories of our hunts, we departed Abbott's Lagoon. We gathered up again at PINC for an evening watching the Great Dance. Avatar has nothing on this movie. Nothing I can say here would be fair to the movie, it's makers, or the people and land it portrays. See it. That's all I can say. These two saw it. Look how happy they are!

Ghosting Trails

After our morning bird sit this week, we gathered in the yurt at Commonweal to debrief and pull out the stories from our morning sit. Before we even considered our markings on the maps, we got into a discussion about a deer seen near the bird sit meadow, and it's interesting behavior. It had pronked away from a downslope observer and stopped at a fence. Out of sight of it's first observer, though unknowingly observed by another person upslope, the deer crouched low and proceeded to trot with a gliding motion, keeping it's body low and even with the ground, along the fence line until it came to a low point, leapt over the fence, and glided away up a ravine. This behavior in the deer ("ghosting") dominated our conversation for two hours straight. We talked about deer gaits, beta-to-delta brain states, predation and hunting, blind spots and ruts in awareness, the wisdom of very old animals, and much more besides. Through it all the bird maps lay unused on the floor. We were all engrossed in our deer trailing conversation.

After our intensive ghosting dowload in the yurt, we got the chance to go out on the land again, in small hunting parties of Essentials, Native Eyes, and Cultural Mentoring students. My group began by following the morning's ghosting deer up it's ravine runs.



We followed easy and open trails until they became choked with brambles and poison oak, and then we crawled through on hands and knees. We found a cavern of willow, blackberry, and juncus that held fresh deer beds, buck rubs from this season, and a large woodrat nest. Which of those creatures left the above marks on the willow limb?



A short belly-crawl later, we found this deer-sized hidey hole under a coyotebrush, the surrounding juncus formed into a perfect deer body mold. Through the backdoor of the hidey hole, we squeezed and inched on our bellies through a tunnel of poison oak and up the steep slope. I wondered for a split second if we were in fact following mountain goats, not deer. But deer pellets and dainty, pointed tracks led the way through the dry coyotebrush and broom-clothed cliff.

The view from halfway up the deer trail was spectacular. We inched on, and as the path began to level out, I heard a rhythmic crashing in the brush ahead. I froze, and the crashing subsided into the distance, one burst at a time. A pronking deer?

Belly-crawling through the broom toward the origin of the sounds, I began to make out a small clearing inthe brush ahead. On my feet now at the edge of the clearing, pushing the brush back, my hand came back wet. I inspected the wet branch and found freshly nipped ends. Was the wetness saliva? Or plant sap? The browse was about two and a half feet off the ground. Could it be deer browse? Or what about rabbit, or mouse? Mice could climb the broom, and we've seen rodents browsing stranger things. I was excited by the possibility that it could be fresh browse from the deer I'd just pushed off of it's daybed.



We followed the trail in the direction of the pronking deer, but quickly lost our fresh trail. We came to a stand of live oaks. There my group was thoroughly distracted by the oaks' climbability.
















We spent the rest of the day tracking the other groups over the landscape by the patterns of bird alarms around them, and trying to stay unnoticed ourselves. We tracked four seperate groups by their concentric rings, and got visual confirmation of three of them. We ended the day by racing down the hill at high speed, following deer trails into the backdoor of Commonweal Garden.

Tracking Day

We’ve been on a three-week break, during which I’ve been, if anything, busier than while class is in session. So it’s taken me this long to blog our last class. But here, at long last, it is!

We met at Venture this week. After romping with Mojo the dog and playing a morning round of T-Rex Frisbee (which is the most awesome game in the Universe) we set off for the lagoon near Pescadero.



We ambled down to the beach to check out the morning’s stories. These marks were all over the sand, crisscrossing each other in little trails and sometimes funneling into a big communal run. I love sand tracking.






We continued on, tried to stick our heads into an old beaver den but found it blocked by a botanical guard. Though many of us are nonreactive to poison oak, we still didn’t push our luck. We consoled ourselves by investigating this interesting mark and fairly fresh scat near the den area.



When we stopped for lunch we found these beautiful prints in the mud of the channel bank, still fairly close to the den area.



As we moved on, we kept on the look out for beavers or beaver sign. They continued to prove elusive, despite the fact that I’d brought my beaver-cut walking stick with me that day. We did get close to a wary, plain-looking turtle. He looked like he was enjoying the sun so we did our best to go quiet and slow and respect his space.



Finally we found our way up the hill to an open area full of grasses and wildflowers. The ground there was peppered with big holes and massive throw mounds. We spread out, looking for the freshest mounds.

On the way, I encountered this butterfly. I’ve never seen this type near my home, or in any other urban area.



Finally we found a fresh looking mound that lolled from the mouth of a very big (perhaps 9 inches across) hole. The mound showed deep lumbering tracks across its length. I took these photos while standing uphill from the hole, with the hole in the lower left corner and the mound extending up the photo, downhill from me.






These tracks raise a lot of questions: Are all of these from the same animal? How was the animal moving, to leave such a jumbled pattern? When was the animal last here? Was this a one-time or repeat use? Why was the animal in the area? Is it still here?

We still had further investigations to carry on elsewhere, so we dragged ourselves away from the tracks and the wildflowers, and moved on to the hypericum zone further south on the coast.

Once at the hypericum area, we all took Cybertrackers and dove in. Our last many attempts have been aborted for one reason or another, and as of this afternoon we hadn’t yet placed any hyperucum data points on our map. Our mission for the last hour or two of the afternoon was to catalogue whatever biodiversity we could. For reference, this is what the interior of the hypericum growth looks like:



Not very diverse. The hypericum is especially strange because one will push through and through the unending monotony of hypericum stalks, and then find, engulfed in the center, the skeleton of a long-dead tree or shrub, shaded out under the thick canopy. After such a find the hypericum seed capsule rattling that follows all of one’s movements often takes on an eerie sound.

But we did find some interesting things. I followed the edge and found a stand of poison hemlock, a plant that I’ve never seen wildlife use very extensively. In the middle of the stand were clipped stalks of hemlock, smoothly cut at an angle very much like a rodent’s or rabbit’s work.



I continued on into the hypericum, and found a woodrat nest uphill from a dead elderberry tree. The net was constructed almost entirely or elderberry sticks, with little hyperucum material. I wondered if the woodrat had such an aversion to hypericum that it would try to use hemlock in the absence of good elderberry or other more commonly used material. When I heard the rat skittering and rattling through the hemlock stand, it sounded to me like he moved with energy and health. But my ears are not well trained in woodrat skitters, so I could be wrong.

We returned, our cybertrackers finally full of good data for our maps.