Lions and tigers and bears, oh my! An interview with Willamette Tracking Guild founder Matt Bradley
A new tracking club, named the “Willamette Tracking Guild,” is being launched on November 6 at 1 p.m. at Hileman Landing (a Lane County park located off Beacon Drive just north of Santa Clara).
The club, which was started by ReWild Eugene founder Matt Bradley, is free and open to individuals of all skill levels who are 16 years of age or older (although younger kids are welcome with adult supervision). Members will meet the first Saturday of each month from 1 to 4 p.m. at Hileman Landing County Park.
“During this initial meeting we will spend some time tracking and some time planning and talking about how to make this club beneficial to anyone who comes,” said Bradley. “Please dress for the weather and bring shoes that you don’t mind getting dirty or wet. If you have questions the day of the meeting or need help finding the place you can call me at 541-517-9098.”
Bradley also said the monthly meetings “will typically offer a brief lesson to the group at the beginning and then folks will be given time to study and practice on their own, benefiting from the experience and observations of the other people in the group.”
Participants should be aware that Lane County charges a fee for parking at many county parks including Hileman Landing ($3 daily, $30 annually for all county parks).
Here’s our interview with Matt Bradley regarding the new Willamette Tracking Guild:
Q. Why did you decide to start a local tracking club?
A. Tracking and awareness has been a personal hobby and passion of mine for five years since I first took a class with Tom Brown Jr’s. Tracker School. Ever since then I have had a desire to connect with other people that share my passion. In fact, ReWild Eugene was initially created with the intention of being mostly a skill-sharing club and our first meeting in October 2007 was a trip to the Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area to go tracking. Since then ReWild Eugene has taken a different direction.
I felt that the time was right to make another attempt at founding a tracking club in the Eugene area. Tracking, after all, is not something that can be learned well from books or lectures, it has to be practiced.
Q. What is the paw print in this image
?
A. That is a really interesting one. My friend, Rees Maxwell, found it and photographed it. It is actually two tracks with opposite directions of travel. They are from the front foot of a raccoon (likely two different raccoons, actually).
Q. Why is tracking a personal hobby of yours?
A. It seems to me that most people’s view of tracking is limited to looking at footprints in mud or sand. Of course that is part of tracking, too, but for me the word “tracking” is inclusive of an entire awareness paradigm. Tracking is about taking in as much information as possible with all your senses and then using your observations to maximize your awareness of your environment.
In the woods that might consist of inspecting torn vegetation to determine the source, reason, age etc. which could tell you about the movements of a specific animal who lives nearby. In another context, it is much like Sherlock Holmes or Jason Bourne using observation and deduction to see and understand things that are seemingly impossible to know. A lot of it comes down to knowing how to ask the right questions but the result is a richer life experience.
Q. Why would others want to join the tracking club?
A. I would hope that they would want to join for the same reason I want to make it happen. The only way to learn to track is to practice. Trackers often call their practice time “dirt time” in reference to the fact that one has to spend a lot of time getting to know the dirt in a personal way. We all have busy lives and it is often difficult to set aside time for practice. One of the main reasons I want this club to happen is to help myself maintain a better routine of dirt time on a regular basis. I hope that it helps other do the same.
Q. How would others benefit from joining the tracking club?
A. Like I stated above, the Guild is designed to provide some structure to the dirt time that folks put in. Partly the benefit is that there will be a regular routine and routines always make things easier. The other benefit that I intend for folks to receive is the sharing of knowledge. Although it is true that no one can teach you to track, it is really helpful to have other people around who have a shared interest in learning and may have some insight to share which would otherwise take you months to figure out through trial and error.
When I say that you can’t learn to track from a class I don’t mean to say that instruction and mentoring aren’t valuable, it is just that without actually doing it, and facing the mysteries that you find, you would never even know how to ask the right questions.
Q. Why is the time “right to make another attempt at founding a tracking club in the Eugene area?”
A. It basically comes down to being better connected with like-minded people and having more recognition around town. Having MyEugene take an interest in what we are doing is an excellent example of why I expect this to be a more successful project this time around. Much of what I talked about already is dependent on people actually showing up which can be surprisingly difficult to accomplish. We are just better positioned today to get the word out than we were three years ago.
Q. What is the most unusual (or rarest) track you’ve found?
A. I was very lucky to get to travel in South Africa a couple of years ago. It was really fascinating to see the tracks of lions and begin to see how to distinguish those from animals like leopards. I also really like elephant tracks for their simplicity (they appear as a big circle on the ground).
On the other hand, what is really thrilling is seeing what is happening right around my own house. For example, I was really surprised last year to see sign of elk right across the road from where I live just outside Eugene. Also, I attached another photo for you of an especially unusual set of bear tracks that I found while hiking on the Pacific Crest Trail in Washington. The lighter colored dirt had adhered to the bear’s feet and then was deposited on the darker soil in its next few steps. It is one of my favorite track photos.
Q. I have to ask: Have you ever seen any Sasquatch-type tracks? Or has anyone shared photos of them with you? Or requested a tracking program for Sasquatch?
A. I have never seen any tracks that would appear to be from a Sasquatch, although some of our campers last summer did see a mysterious bear-like creature in the middle of the night at one of our summer Nature Camps. There was no clear sign left behind the next day, though, so who knows?
Q. Is Oregon a tracking hot bed? What other geographical areas are great for tracking?
A. Historically, the best trackers in the world have come from desert areas where there is lots of sand to track in such as the Kalahari or Sonora deserts. That isn’t to say that they were limited to tracking only on sand. Those masters could follow creatures across bare rock, it was just that they had tons of easy terrain to get started and practice on.
Today, thanks to a huge growth in schools that teach tracking, there are great trackers all over the world. Many of those great programs are located in Oregon and Washington. South Africa is also an area where tracking is still growing as a craft. Some people in South Africa have even developed software to help indigenous trackers record their observations for the purpose of wildlife research and protection.
Being a tracker in a place like Oregon has its own challenges as most of the environments where we live are forest. Everywhere an animal steps it leaves a footprint; but it takes a different level of observation to see it in the soft forest floor than it does on soft mud or sand. In that sense there is a steeper learning curve to getting started. It takes a little bit of brain patterning to begin to see the signs that were there all along.
Q. Is this the only tracking club in Oregon? The first?
A. It is definitely not the first. In part, my inspiration to put this together comes from a program that Portland Metro Parks used to do (perhaps they still do, it has been a long time since I have been up there for it) which they called “Dirt Time.” It took place at Oxbow Regional Park, which features an awesome sand bar that is teeming with everything from mice to bears. I haven’t been lucky enough yet to find a place like that near Eugene but I am pretty pleased with the site that we have found for the Willamette Tracking Guild.
Photo Credit: ReWild Eugene
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