Tracks & Tracking in Southern Africa (Pocket Guide), by Louis Liebenberg

Tracks & Tracking in Southern Africa (Pocket Guide) by Louis Liebenberg. Penguin Random House South Africa. Imprint: Struik Nature. Cape Town, South Africa 2023. ISBN 9781775848714 / ISBN 978-1-77-584871-4

Tracks & Tracking in Southern Africa (Pocket Guide) by Louis Liebenberg provides simple tools to help interpret the tracks and signs of some 125 southern African mammals, reptiles, frogs and birds.

TRACKING IM NATURE CONSERVATION

Trackers play a key role in the growing ecotourism industry, serving as the eyes and ears of those who embark on game-viewing drives and wilderness trails. They are also crucial in anti-poaching operations. Intruders may be detected even when they leave no clearly discernible human footprints. For example, fleeing animals will leave tracks that indicate a disturbance - a human-inspired one if there are no signs of a natural predator. Scavenger spoor converging on a point may also indicate the presence of a large carcass, perhaps of an animal killed by poachers. Expert trackers, able to garner information denied to conventional observers, also render valuable assistance to researchers studying animal behaviour. Combining traditional tracking with modern technology, such as radio tracking, allows the researcher to accomplish much more than either method could on its own. At the leading edge of the technology is the CyberTracker field computer, a device that enables trackers to record all their field observations, and to store them in a database for future reference. An integrated Global Positioning System (GPS) records the location, time and date of each entry by means of satellite navigation. The data collected can also be fed into a Geographic Information System (GIS). All of this may sound rather complex, but in fact the system is easy to use in terms of both input and access: managers and other interested parties are able to call up the maps, tables and other graphics to analyze data and to monitor long-term trends at the touch of a button.

READING THE SIGNS

Short of direct visual observation, an animal's track - its footprint -provides the surest clue to its presence (or passage) and its identity. However, animals can often be detected and sometimes identified by a variety of other signs, including scuff marks, broken twigs, freshly turned stones, leaves and other objects, trampled and horned vegetation, riverbank mud displacement, droppings, pellets and latrines.

Droppings

Faeces are among the more obvious of these supplementary signs. Those of elephants, rhinos and hippos, for example, are large and rounded; hippos tend to scatter theirs with a paddle-like action of their tails, often found on or near the paths along the riverbanks that serve as their night-time feeding grounds. Rhinos defecate in territorial middens. Zebra dung has a distinctive and regular kidney shape; warthog droppings are similar in appearance, but more irregular and rounder. Antelope tend to have similar-shaped droppings - pellet-like, with a point at one end and an indentation at the other - so it can be hard to identify a particular species from this sign alone. Often, the best one can do is make a rough estimate of the animal's size (small, medium, large). Giraffe droppings are similar to the antelopes' but are larger and, because they fall from a height, tend to be scattered. Most mammalian carnivores leave narrow, cylindrical or sausage-shaped droppings that are pointed at one end. Omnivores, such as baboons and honey badgers, also tend to produce cylindrical droppings, as do the plant-eating porcupines. Droppings often reveal what an animal eats, which is a more than useful pointer to species identification. The dung of the hook-lipped (black) rhino, for example, contains the remains of twigs and leaves; the square-lipped (white) rhino's faeces reveal its grass diet. [...]

This is an excerpt from Tracks & Tracking in Southern Africa (Pocket Guide), by Louis Liebenberg.

Title: Tracks & Tracking in Southern Africa
Series: Pocket Guide
Author: Louis Liebenberg
Publisher: Penguin Random House South Africa
Imprint: Struik Nature
Cape Town, South Africa 2023
ISBN 9781775848714 / ISBN 978-1-77-584871-4
Softcover, 11 x 18 cm, 144 pages, 175 colour photographs