A Barbarian at the Gates

You’ll see this assertion a lot in online tracking communities; it’s even part of the spiel on telling the difference between canine and feline tracks at a sanctuary where I volunteer. Claws mean dog; no claws mean cat.

First of all, that’s not necessarily true. Cats do have claws, after all, and just because they tend to keep them retracted when on the move doesn’t mean that they always do. There are no universal, one hundred percent always true criteria in tracking. Variations in substrate, in behavior, in movement, and many other variables make for tracks and sign that show up differently than you’d expect.

Secondly, stopping at a single criterion or description when IDing a track or sign risks short-circuiting the observational skill that tracking both leverages and trains. Even when I’m sure of an ID, I’ve gotten into the habit of looking for at least three indications that I’m correct. Every so often, doing so causes me to change my mind—or at least consider alternatives to my ID. If I can’t come up with three, I need to study more.

But let’s get back to cats and dogs.


It is true that the claws guideline is often a reliable starting point.

Feline and canine tracks are similar, but there are several ways to distinguish them beyond claws. To begin with, there’s the overall shape: canine tracks are generally more oval, longer front to back than side to side. Feline tracks are generally rounder. They both have four toes, but the dog’s tracks will have the middle two toes leading, while the outer toes are set further back (and, in some species such as the coyote and black-backed jackal, are almost behind the middle toes). Meanwhile, the cat’s toes are more spread out laterally. One of the two middle toes will usually be slightly ahead of all the rest, and that will indicate whether the foot that made it was a left or a right.


Here are some nice, clear canine tracks, a front and hind side by side. The overall tidiness and diminutive size leads me to ID this as coyote.

Here already we’ll run into exceptions. While the above holds true for every wild canine I’ve ever seen, and every wild or domestic feline, domestic dog tracks can vary enormously when it comes to overall shape and how the toes show up in relation to one another in the track. There’s also the question of substrate: something loose and slippery, like deep, dry sand, can cause even a canine foot to spread out laterally. I once misidentified a mountain lion track as a large domestic dog for this very reason. (Also, claws—but we’ll come back to that!)

The above can affect the placement of the toes in relation to the palm or heel; that said, as a general rule, with a canine track you can draw an “X” by making two lines starting between the outer toes on each side, and going straight to the bottom of the track, without ever crossing the heel pad. With a feline track, at least one of those lines will cross the heel pad.


Here’s a nice, clear bobcat track, found on a dirt road in western Washington.

Then there’s the shape of the heel pad. If you’re lucky enough to find a super clear and detailed track, you’ll see a more triangular shape to the heel if the track is canine, while the feline’s is more trapezoidal. The canine track will have two lobes at the rear of the heel pad, while the feline track will have three—though this is one of those details that tends to show up less clearly in messy substrate. The way that I’m giving exceptions to every guideline here hopefully highlights the importance of having more than one support for a given ID.

And that goes for claws, too. Cats use claws for two things: as weapons, and for traction. On slippery ground, such as mud, snow, or soft sand, they might well use their claws to keep from sliding.

Similarly, claws don’t always show in canine tracks. Coyote claws can be so narrow and pointed that they don’t register on harder substrate, and gray foxes actually have semi-retractable claws.


A pair of gray fox tracks. The overall characteristics are distinctly canine, but claws are not showing.

One of the frustrating things about tracking is that there are always exceptions. That’s also one of the wonderful things about it. On an eval I took recently there was so much debate about one of the stations that even the evaluators finally agreed that there was room for an alternative interpretation. I often like to say that the wildlife hasn’t read the field manuals, and even guidebooks written by experts aren’t prescriptive. Asking further questions is an invitation to look for further evidence. Sometimes, those are the claws of a cat.

(Originally posted at Following Curiosity. You can comment here or there.)

My neighborhood book club is reading Deciding to See: The View from Nathan’s Bus. Seattle readers, especially those who ride the bus regularly, are familiar with Nathan Vass, who’s been driving for King County Metro long enough that I first read one of his pieces, “Ode to the 358”, way back in 2013. He’s also a storyteller, photographer, and filmmaker, and that skillset together with a sharp observational sense and the plethora of stories available on city buses—especially the routes and times of day he tends to drive—make for the kind of work that reminds us of our shared humanity.

For awhile now I’ve been struggling to articulate just what it is about the kinds of stories and artworks I seek, the experiences I look to have, my passion for stories and for tracking (two things which are intimately and inextricably linked)—what is the thing that I’m after?

It came to me while reading Deciding to See: kinship with the unfamiliar. Comfort zones can nourish us, give us space to rest and heal, and provide a sense of safety. They can also become prisons.

I had cause recently to re-read T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Hollow Men,” which is the origin of one of those phrases that has since become a colloquial saying, divorced from its original context:

This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper

…minus that context it still retains a great deal of its original meaning and power, mind you.

Here, have it read by Jeremy Irons. Chilling.

Speaking of hollow men, the Atlantic article, What I Learned About Billionaires at Jeff Bezos’s Private Retreat, is enough to put you off your lunch. Every so often I interact with other people who worked at Amazon in the early days, and every so often one of these people comments on how much Jeff Bezos has changed. I don’t think he has.

I finally read Matthew Jackson’s essay on…well, it’s not really about “The Pitt,” that’s just his operative example, really it’s about storytelling and expectations and people who get absolutely outraged when a story’s plot doesn’t go the way they think it should. As he says, you can have whatever opinion you want about whatever’s happening on the screen (or on the page), but I agree with him that getting hung up on plot, to the point that you’re arguing for people to be fired, sells the entire experience of absorbing a story short. If one of the reasons I read, watch, listen is to acquire a feeling of kinship with the unfamiliar, part of that is intentionally immersing myself in the creator’s world. That’s not to say that I don’t often enjoy picking the thing apart afterwards, whether to work out how they did something or to analyze what I didn’t like about it, but I think there’s a difference between disagreeing with a creator’s choices and rendering a moral judgment about something that I personally didn’t like. Even when Roger Ebert wrote his review of North (the one that starts, “I hated, hated, hated this movie”), he wasn’t calling for the heads of the people responsible.

Awhile back I mentioned Jeff VanderMeer’s article for Orion magazine, about (generally speaking) how very odd it is that people go looking for cryptids like Sasquatch when there are amazing, verifiable, extant creatures out there. Such as bears.

Anyway, Orion did a Q&A with him and writer McKayla Coyle, who I wasn’t previously familiar with but whose work I now want to read. Check it out:



(Originally posted at Following Curiosity. You can comment here or there.)

Guess what? Coyote butt!

…a little over three weeks, actually. Though I’ve had longer gaps in blogging before, lately I’ve been trying to make a more regular practice of it, for a few different reasons. The main one is that I enjoy it. Other reasons include reflecting on things in a way that accounts for the possibility that someone might read them, as well as my annoyance at how many people I know who, instead of sharing their own thoughts (however awkwardly phrased), repost narratives that are either obviously AI-generated, or (more troubling in my view) written in that rhetorical style, because that’s what’s getting shared. This mostly happens on Facebook, and is a major reason that I’m spending less time there.

Probably good for me.

The week before last, I went down to the Oregon Dunes for a three-day tracking course, followed by a CyberTracker evaluation. I’d scored a 99% on my last track and sign eval in the Pacific Northwest, and I was hoping this time around to gain that elusive one hundred. That didn’t happen, but I learned a lot and got to enjoy being in my tracking community, and those are what count.

The Dunes are an amazing combination of vast stretches of sand, and a coastal rainforest ecosystem. I’ve found salamander tracks leading across the dunes in between the forested deflation zones or larger tree islands. From the tops of the dunes you can see all the way to the sea. The shape of the landscape shifts over time, and yet there are landmarks. Dangers are few, but the one that always unnerves me are the stovepipes. The sand has buried entire groves of trees, and when these die and rot away, they can leave hollow columns behind. Step in one of these and your leg might go in up to your hip.

I’ve gone there alone a few times in spite of this, and that can be fun, in the way that chosen solitude is fun. I’ve chosen my own route across the sand and napped on the beach. But going with a group, especially a group of fellow trackers, is the best. Not just for safety reasons, but because you learn more with a group.

When I got back I spent much of the week getting ready for the community garage sale. This is a huge annual event that this year involved over 600 households. Mine was small and off the beaten path, but I still had a steady trickle of people all day. I was surprised at how popular the CDs were, but perhaps the same people who haunt garage sales are also fans of physical media. In the final ten minutes I sold off the second of two tents, a battery charger, and an old rice cooker—it still works of course, but we’d replaced it with a bigger one.

I also went to see Carmen at Seattle Opera with an old friend. Carmen has a lot about it that’s pretty problematic, mostly having to do with race, but there’s a lot you can mitigate with staging and presentation. This production was more sympathetic to its lead than some I’ve seen. (I’ve never found José, the male lead, sympathetic at all, though he’s supposed to read as normative at least. Hmph.)

And then, of course, Sunday was Mother’s Day, so I visited my parents and then went on an outing with South Sound Tracking Club.

Anyway, all that means I haven’t had much time to write, though I did complete some freelance work.

I don’t have any clever note to end this on, but that’s what’s up.

(Originally posted at Following Curiosity. You can comment here or there.)