A tracking challenge, plus how to tell deer tracks from coyote tracks via the straddle

Description

Learn to distinguish deer and coyote tracks from a distance (or when tracks are unclear) using the straddle. Plus, a tracking challenge for you!

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Tags: Kenton Whitman,ReWild University,Human Rewilding,personal rewilding,mindfulness,how to,bushcraft,survival,wilderness survival skills,how to survive in the woods,tracking

Video Transcription

today I have a mystery track for you just to test your tracking skills and a little tracking lesson this is something that comes in really really useful if you're walking through the woods and you want to let's say you're you're seeing some tracks go up a far hill and by learning the gait patterns and the straddle with of different animals you can sometimes look from quite a distance and identify the tracks today I'm just gonna focus on straddle width and I'll illustrate this further in the video but if I have tracks going along this is the distance you can measure from the inside of the outside of the track so I'm gonna measure from the outside the distance between those the straddle of the animal it has to do with the agility of the animal and the width of its hips so today we're gonna focus on identifying a deer from far away and being able to contrast that with certain members of the canid or dog family particularly coyotes or foxes and the way to tell is that the even though they might appear to somebody as looking fairly similar from a distance if you pay attention to the straddle you're gonna notice that deer have quite a wide straddle where the coyote walks almost in a straight line in the Fox which I'm not going to show on here but the Fox is almost like it's on a tightrope it puts its feet right in front of the other foot of course there is immense depth to learning tracking but this one little trick starting to identify straddle width can help you tell from a long way away whether it's a deer coyote [Music]

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so hopefully that's really evident now that difference between straddle width of the deer and the straddle width of the coyote and again if you see a fox it's gonna look even more so wolves we have a lot of wolves here and the Wolves have a straddle that approximates the deer it's pretty wide however their tracks are so much bigger that you still can look across a valley and say that's a wolf or that's a deer and of course getting up and verifying your tracks very important to do but it's kind of a cool power to be able to look across the way and say oh I bet you that's a deer let's go take a look all right so that strange slide that first track that I showed you if you haven't guessed yet that was an otter very very playful animal like the kids back in the distance here and they like to slide along so what we were seeing is originally there was some slush on that ice and they were sliding along on their Bali that creates that long long slide pattern then they often were gonna get up jump once or twice and slide again so when we zoomed in on those tracks in between the slides that was the otter coming out of the slide getting some speed again and going back into a slide thank you for watching my friends please in the comments share anything else you know about tracking particularly straddle with and helping to tell these two families apart the undulates and the canid and yeah share your insight your knowledge your wisdom talk with you soon and of course let me know if you got the otter