The Power to Protect: Citizen Conservation – PART 2

Nose to the Ground
As a kid, Marty Colón spent his days studying tracks in the tacky sands of Lake Michigan’s shore. He would find a track, identify the animal that made it, then follow its path up and down the beach.

That’s a pretty great childhood.

Essentially, Marty is still following the tracks of his childhood. Now, however, he’s tracking mammals big and small and teaching others the rewards of observing the signs, scats, and tracks beneath their feet.

There are stories imprinted in the soil. While you’re sleeping, when you’re not around, when you’re at work in the city, animals are roaming the woods, riverbanks, and alpine tundra. If you never see these animals, it doesn’t mean they don’t exist—or that you can’t unravel the mystery of their behavior.

Tracking offers an extension to what we see. With a bit of patience, an investigative method, and dirt on your knees, you can figure out what animal it was that went down the trail before you.

Marty has been teaching tracking skills for 30 years. He’s honed his method to three simple steps. Follow them (and take a tracking class or two) and you will not only be able to follow the animal’s tracks, you’ll be able to see an entirely new world of behavior that wasn’t apparent before.

1) Collecting Track Level Evidence
As the name implies, track level evidence is on the ground—not in a book, and not in your brain. When you come across a track, be careful not to guess, thinking you are familiar with the print. Be careful not to exclude certain species based on your presumed familiarity with its habitat and range. When I took a class with Marty, we found a black bear track in Prospect Park. Yup, in the middle of Wheat Ridge.

There are four pieces of evidence that you will want to look for—and write down in a notebook. First, count the number of digits. In Colorado, that can be four, five, or two (technically, the ungulates—things like deer and elk—have a hoof made of two clouts).

After you’ve determined the number of digits, you’ll want to decide whether they are long and slender like fingers, or short and stubby like your big toe. If you can see any claws, note whether they’ve made a fine point near the tip of the digit (indicative of claws that are curved at a 90-degre angle and good for climbing) or are a bit thicker (like a dog’s claws, which are your general purpose claw—not built exclusively for climbing or digging). If you see the indication of a long, thick claw that extends well beyond the end of the digit, you’ve probably found the track of a digger—things like skunks, badgers, and wolverines.

Finally, make note (in fact, make a sketch) of the shape of the interdigital pad, the surface that sits behind the digits—it can look heart-shaped, bean-shaped, and sometimes like the heel of a human.

2) Determining Family
If you know the number of digits in a track, you can start to hone in on the family of your animal. Four digits? It’s very likely to be from the dog, cat, or rabbit family. Or it could be from the rodent family, whose animals have four front digits and five in the rear.

Five digits? It will have to be from the raccoon, opossum, shrew, bear, or weasel family (things like wolverine, sea otter, badger, skunk, marten, and ferret). Again, rodents have five digits on their rear feet so you could have yourself a rodent track.

Two digits? That’s a bit easier; you’ve found a track from the deer family: bison, moose, elk, bighorn sheep, mountain goat, caribou, mule and white-tailed deer, or pronghorn.

If you know the structure and function of those digits, you can eliminate even further. Are they long, finger-like digits that would be good for grasping and climbing? Think of raccoons and squirrels. Are they short and blunt, general purpose toes? Think dogs, cats, and bears.

Next, the shape of the interdigital pad tells you even more. Based on it’s shape, you can further refine your search.

3) Determining Species
Now you’re ready to take the final step and unravel the mystery. Here, you can use a series of gross filters to eliminate species within each possible family. First, look at size. Using a tracking field guide, you can determine if the track is near in size to the average track for a particular species. Too big or too small and you can eliminate that animal from your list of suspects. Be sure not to measure claws—or overshoot your evidence. That is, don’t eliminate an animal unless you’re absolutely sure. In the end, you may not have enough evidence to narrow it down to only one species.

Marty’s guide of choice? Falcon Guide’s Scats and Tracks series. There’s one specific to the Rocky Mountains that’s small enough to carry each time you head into the outdoors.

Power in Numbers
Certainly, this brief overview isn’t enough to turn you into an expert tracker, or a citizen scientist. But we all possess what it takes to start as a citizen naturalist. And perhaps  this lesson will inspire you to learn more. With a bit of training and a sound method, the skill of tracking (and scat and sign identification) can make every landscape come alive in a new way.

Still, you may be thinking that these simple observations are just that: simple. But, over time and in large quantities, the information that citizens collect can tell us a lot about the changes taking place in a landscape and its viability as suitable habitat. No, they won’t replace raw data, scientific inquiry, or thorough research, but they can wholeheartedly supplement it. And they give us a role in preserving and protecting Colorado’s wild places and wild things. That’s quite a powerful feeling.

Read the first part of The Power to Protect: Citizen Conservation.

The Power to Protect: Citizen Conservation – PART 1

When you’re out hiking, do you ever see wildlife tracks? Ever see (or step in) elk scat? Chances are, you see them all the time. Ever roamed through a wildlife corridor? Hiked amongst the habitat of an endangered species? Chances are, you’ve probably done this, too, whether you’ve known it or not.

Now, what if you could put your passion for the outdoors to good use for Colorado’s roaming wild things? All it takes is something you’ve already got: two eyes and two feet.

Everyday citizens, especially those who often find themselves out on the trails of our state, have the power to make a difference in protecting our land, and the animals who call it home. The success of many conservation efforts is based on being able to document and monitor the threats within a particular landscape, and gauge any changes that result from the efforts. Increasingly, conservation professionals are looking to volunteers as important components to successful conservation programs.

There are a wide range of skill sets and training requirements for conservation volunteers, depending on the needs of the program. Some of these have specialized technical classes in areas like wildlife tracking or habitat and species identification; you might hear this referred to as “citizen science.”

However, one of the most underutilized volunteer skills is the simple power of observation. Citizen naturalist programs that rely more on this natural world experience and less on the specialized training of citizen science are equally powerful for furthering conservation. Either way, anyone who spends time in the outdoors can benefit from knowing more about what they’re seeing around them. And Colorado—and its wildlife—will benefit, too.

Finding Signs
Each place we hike in is a bit different, in terms of the species of wildlife we might see, the intended use of the land, the condition it is in, and the threats it may be facing—or may face in the future. Perhaps the corridor falls on National Forest land, and is managed for multiple uses like recreation and timber production. Perhaps the area is known to be prime habitat for a threatened or endangered species.

By keeping a few simple questions in mind when you’re hiking, you’ll be able to help scientists and land managers better understand the landscape and how wildlife use the area. If the corridor happens to be near a major highway, like Herman Gulch, then your visit will help you to understand the importance of landscape connectivity.

Keep in mind questions that help tell the overall story of the conditions and suitability of the area for wildlife: Which animals did you observe and where?

People are not the only ones that think with their stomachs. How about food for wildlife? Did you see plants for foraging or prey species?

Water is usually an important feature of a wildlife corridor. Did you see good sources of flowing water or perhaps snow pack in the hills?

The climate of Colorado is changing; colder, longer winters used to be a natural control of the native bark beetles in our forests. Did you see large stands of trees with reddish-orange needles, or stands of dead trees?

The answers to these questions will indicate how the area’s multiple uses are being managed, and how habitat fragmentation can affect various wildlife species.

So, what do you do with this information once you’ve collected it? Well, always be sure to write things down and photograph or video animals, tracks, scat, rubbings, markings, and any other signs of wildlife behavior, corridor conditions, and impacts.

Then, you can turn to that great database in the sky: the internet. In fact, organizations like Witness for Wildlife are designed to help people document and record their observations; they even have field guides for known wildlife corridors online so that you can download them before you make your visit.

What are they hoping to collect? Not only are these organizations interested in what you’ve seen—everything from the animals you may have been lucky enough to see, to the conditions of the habitat—but they also want to know what your experience was like. Did the practice of observation change your perspective of corridor connectivity? Did you see solutions to any of the threats that might have existed?

You can find downloadable field guides to corridors across Colorado (and the country), learn more about corridor hikes in your area, and input your own observations at www.witnessforwildlife.org.

Of course, there’s always a next step. This one, however, is certainly not for everyone. But, if you feel like taking your powers of observation to a whole new level, with a little training you can turn your hikes into sleuthing excursions in the outdoors, a fusion of detective work, scientific inquiry, and, of course, walking in the woods.

Read the second part of The Power to Protect: Citizen Conservation.

Back home in Colorado

I recently traveled through the Alps on foot and, as you would imagine, it was absolutely gorgeous. Panoramas that could make you trip, gnarled unions of fragmenting glaciers and scaly rock, glowing green grasses. But, there was something missing.

Wildlife.

Yes, there was the occasional marmot or chamois. But, that was it. The only animal I saw time and time again was, of course, the cow. These cows may have looked a bit disreputable, but they weren’t wild.

So when I returned to Colorado, it was rewarding to begin work on this special issue of the magazine. It quickly reminded me of all the incredible species of animal that call Colorado home, some of which can’t be found anywhere else in the world, and some of which face threats that put their entire existence into question.

These animals could use our help. They aren’t as resilient as we humans seem to be to the onslaught of new roads and hazards in our state. While most of us probably daydream about roaming free, their very survival depends on it.

And they make Colorado an enviable place to live. They make every trip into the mountains an opportunity to be surprised, or astonished, by their very presence.

The next time you’re out roaming free, think of them. They want the same thing you do.

See more photography at www.chriscasephoto.com.