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 Some People Have The Power To See The Past Come Alive. By Kevin Franklin I CAN SEE the mountain lioness casually pacing down the road. She's the queen of all she surveys. The other animals scurry alongside the road or bound across it, but that's not how a lioness behaves. After all, what does she have to fear? No other creatures would contemplate challenging her, except maybe humans. But humans are loud and slow and easy to avoid. This is a lonely road and cars are rare here. Humans may have built it, but this is the queen's road. Sensing the relative safety, her cubs come tumbling out of the underbrush and follow their mother along the road. They dash back and forth playing lion games and run in circles in a pile of soft sand. They pass right beneath me. Their mother continues down the road toward creek and they prance after her.
Tracks provide the natural instant replays of terrestrial activity. Good trackers can gauge the weight, speed, health and sometimes even the sex of an animal they've never seen. With years of practice some trackers can follow even faint tracks over rugged terrain. But you don't need years of practice and study to enjoy watching animals that passed by hours beforehand. All you need is little-used road or soft surface. With just a few hours of reading or instruction, a complete novice can begin to see the outlines of a vast and complex story unfolding before him. One of the best ways to pick up a lot of tracking knowledge in a hurry is to work alongside an experienced tracker. For instance, I'm spending the weekend learning tracking skills in a workshop jointly sponsored by The Sky Island Alliance and the Tucson Audubon Society. We're in Brown Canyon, part of the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge administered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Experienced trackers Roseann Hanson and Andy Holdsworth teach us to spot and read gray fox, coyote, javelina, deer, skunk, bobcat and, of course, lion tracks. Aside from showing folks the sheer joy of tracking, the workshop also is helping to prepare a new group of volunteer trackers. The Sky Island Alliance needs these trackers in their ongoing effort to help determine wildlife corridors. The Sky Island Alliance, a coalition of scientists and conservationists, conducts regular tracking surveys in southern Arizona. They hope to preserve the open corridors that exist between various animal populations that live in protected habitats.
"Most of our protected areas," Holdsworth says, "are based on aesthetics and not biology." Species that get trapped by human development are subject to "island biogeography," he says. Just as if they were on an island, they're cut off from the rest of the gene pool of their species. There is no place for offspring to go and no way for separated populations to be replenished if disease or other factors reduce their numbers. "The smaller these areas are," Holdsworth says, "and the farther they are from mainland species, the closer they are to extinction." A perfect example of this is the bighorn sheep population on Pusch Ridge in the Catalina Mountains. Few, if any, sheep still live on Pusch Ridge, which, until the human population boom of Tucson's northwest side, used to support a large and healthy population. "We as humans have to stand in our mountains and look at other mountains and think, how are these animals going to cross?" says Holdsworth. In order to answer that question, groups like the Sky Island Alliance need to know all corridors the animals use and which ones are critical. The best way to build that data base is to start working from the ground up.
Next Week: Can Out There Guy survive the agonizingly steep climb up Florida Canyon in the Santa Rita Mountains?
Getting ThereThe Sky Island Alliance will conduct a track count March 28-29. Experienced trackers will be on hand to show newcomers the ropes. They'll be meeting south of Sonoita at the Arizona Trail parking lot on Forest Service Road 799. Trackers gather Saturday night and begin tracking Sunday morning. Call 323-0547 or 628-7609 for more information. You can also check out their website at www.lobo.net/~skisland.
Recommended Reading
A Field Guide To Mammal Tracking In North America,
by James Halfpenny, provides an excellent source of information
on learning how to read tracks.
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I witness all this-albeit nearly a day after it took place. I
use no video camera, no satellite tracking, no computer or equipment
of any kind besides my eyes and a little training. But I see it
all clearly before me. It's as clear at the ground in front of
me--and the tracks they left on it.
As things currently stand, a great many of our mountain ranges
are managed by government agencies. The animals that live within
these are somewhat protected, or at least insulated, from human
impact. However, as humans continue to build and develop the areas
around these habitats, they become isolated from each other. Eventually
the animals that live in the mountains are no longer able to migrate
from range to range. They are genetically marooned.
