Natural Perspectives:

Most young people today are raised in cities. They lack knowledge of life in the great outdoors. I consider myself lucky that my father took me hunting for rabbits and fishing back in Indiana. I learned to track from him. I could tell which way a rabbit was headed and whether or not it was in a hurry. Those weekend outings in Hoosier farm country during my youth certainly weren’t wilderness experiences, but they gave me an appreciation of nature.

When Vic and I were in Connecticut during graduate school, we lived for a year on a 7-acre farm while the faculty member who owned it was on sabbatical. Vic began birding that year. We raised lambs, grew a garden—our first together—and enjoyed winter walks in the snow through the woods. It was fun to read the signs in the snow to see what animals had been by since our last walk.

A number of years ago, Vic and I had a writing assignment to cover birding in winter at Yellowstone National Park. Keep in mind that Yellowstone doesn’t just freeze in winter, it blasts the landscape with temperatures of 30 degrees below zero. And that’s not counting the wind chill factor. Two feet of fresh snow had fallen. A whole series of winter storms were lined up one after another, promising even more snow. No problem, we thought; we enjoy cold weather. The fresh snow would make for good tracking.

When we stepped out of the plane onto the tarmac in Bozeman, Mont., that January, we were blasted in the face with an icy wind laced with snowflakes. The cold took our breath away, but the arriving locals remarked with pleasure about how warm it was. I hadn’t been worried about the cold until then.

On our first night in Livingston, Mont., we braved 25-degree weather to enjoy the hot tub on the roof of the historic Murray Hotel. By the end of our stay, we found ourselves at historic Chico Hot Springs. I will never forget that freezing dash to the hot springs. With the thermometer reading 3 degrees, we shed our shoes and coats to mince barefoot across slick ice. Those 15 feet to the hot springs was the coldest trip of our lives. Once in the water, our eyelashes froze together. Our hair became coated with steam, which quickly froze. We looked like snow monkeys.

Ah, but I digress. The real point of bringing up our Yellowstone trip was to extol the tracking skills of park ranger Terry McEneaney. He not only could tell one bird or animal’s track from another, he could read a scene in the snow like a page from an ecology text. We came across a dead elk—a wolf kill. Because it was a fresh kill, we didn’t risk going over to it because the wolf pack was still nearby.

A few hundred yards away, Terry saw a disturbed spot in the snow. He and Vic hiked over to it, and Terry interpreted what had happened from the tracks and other signs in the snow. Terry deduced that ravens had stolen a piece of meat from the wolf kill and had buried it. A marten had risked battling the ravens for a piece of the bounty. The bottom line of this slice of life in the woods was that the return of wolves to Yellowstone has benefited the ecosystem, making more meat available to smaller carnivores in the food chain.

Today’s young people rarely get to experience the thrill of reading tracks like a detective, of figuring out what has happened in nature just by the signs that are left behind. So when I discovered that Starr Ranch on Bell Canyon Road in Trabuco Canyon offered an educational program on tracking to school groups, I jumped for it. Starr Ranch is a 4,000-acre nature preserve that is run by Sea and Sage Audubon.

I arranged with Christy Cincotta, a riparian research assistant at Starr Ranch, to bring my orientation crew from the Orange County Conservation Corps there last Thursday. We agreed to pull nonnative periwinkle along Bell Creek during the morning in exchange for their program on tracking mammals in the afternoon.

This was a fabulous experience for the corps members. They got to see “Silent Bob,” a great horned owl that was recuperating from a wing injury, and a barn owl captured live on a webcam. They also saw deer. The next day in class, they wrote short essays about their experience.

“It was amazing,” wrote Rubi Mena. “I had never been that close to a deer. I had just seen them on TV.”

“We learned about how the biologists use scent to lure the wildlife,” wrote Jaime Iglesias. He also enjoyed working with Christy. “She taught us about periwinkle and scat.”

“What I liked about the ranch was the environment,” wrote Maria Treveno. “It seemed so calm.”

After a picnic lunch under towering eucalyptus trees by an old orchard, we met Dan Mitchell, a resident biologist who conducts the program on mammal tracking. Dan had set up six scent stations two days previously. He had spread and smoothed out six 5-foot-wide circles of finely powdered gypsum on the nature trail. Onto a large rock in the center, he placed a dropper full of scent lure, a horribly putrid mix of anal gland contents from a variety of animals. Apparently the stench is really attractive to a variety of predators.

Dan gave a PowerPoint presentation on how to tell apart tracks and scat of skunk, raccoon, opossum, coyote, gray fox, bobcat, and mountain lion. Then we hiked the nature trail to monitor the scent stations, collecting data on tracks and scat. We found tracks of all of those animals, even mountain lion, plus scat of gray fox, bobcat, and mountain lion. Back at the education center, Dan showed us a collection of video clips from the motion-activated webcam that is trained on one of the scent stations. We saw videos of all the above mammals plus deer, birds and squirrels. This was a great experience for all of us.

To learn more about Starr Ranch and its program of activities for 2007, visit www.starrranch.org or call (949) 858-0309. They’d love to have you come volunteer.

VIC LEIPZIG and LOU MURRAY are Huntington Beach residents and environmentalists. They can be reached at vicleipzig@aol.com.