SWTI Wildlife Tracking Intensive

Weekend 1
The Tracker's Eye  

Sharpening Your Observational Edge

January 30 - February 1, 2026

Sierra Vista, AZ—San Pedro River Valley and Huachuca Mountains:

This unique ecological crossroads southeast of the Tucson metro area marks where the Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts meet the Sky Islands.

The San Pedro River, the last undammed major river in the Southwest, serves as a vital wildlife corridor, while the foothills of the Huachuca Mountains with varying elevations and microclimates. This area is home to diverse wildlife, including mountain lion, javelina, coati, black bear, and myriad small mammals.

This area has excellent tracking opportunities! Water is rare here, and the San Pedro and perennial canyon streams are major wildlife attractants. Elevation shifts from river level to mountain foothills provide varied habitats and tracking conditions. And the convergence of the Sonoran and Chihuahuan Desert ecosystems, especially where the high-altitude Sky Islands rise from the desert floor.

Weekend 1 focuses on observation, and training your eye. We will cover:

• Deep observation skills:  How to eliminate the visual “noise” around track and sign.
• Essential visual characteristics used by the highest-scoring trackers: Sometimes called the elements of art, you’ll learn to discern shape, texture, proportion, value, and other patterns.
• Time-honored strategies for learning to separate your interpretations and emotional projections from your observations.
• Structured individual exercises: Engage in hands-on, guided exercises designed to reinforce the critical distinction between direct observation and subjective interpretation. We’ll blend solo work with collaborative discussion to  foster your observation skills.
• Track journaling:  Journaling what you see in the field equals powerful learning. We'll learn a style of track journaling that has helped generations of trackers hone their observation skills.

By the end of Weekend 1, you’ll have built a solid foundation in observation and awareness—and learned skills to move towards creating objective observations, setting you up for success in your journey as a tracker. You'll also have completed at least one tracking journal under the guidance of our instructors, setting you up for our optional between-class homework assignments, or to continue on your own time.

Weekend 2
The Tracker's Process

Building a Framework for Success

February 27 - March 1, 2026

Anza Borrego Desert—Southeast California

The Anza Borrego Desert near Borrego Springs, California is at the heart of a vast expanse of nearly a million acres of low Sonoran Desert wilderness offering pristine tracking conditions across diverse terrains. The area includes the largest state park in California and adjacent wild lands.

Spring-fed desert washes act as wildlife corridors, where bobcats, coyotes, and mule deer regularly leave their stories in the sand. Peninsular bighorn sheep descend from rocky elevations to water sources, particularly along routes like the Palm Canyon Trail. Crisp sand dunes provide excellent track definition for small mammals species. Desert wash systems consist of mud from flash floods where tracks can last for days, or weeks, offering excellent opportunities to study track aging.

Tracking is all about process! Building on the strong observational skills developed in Weekend 1, the second weekend introduces you to a structured three-step tracking process that transforms raw observational data into identification and interpretation, that is as accurate as your skill level allows. This process is your roadmap to building your skillset, and understanding the track and sign that animals leave behind.

SWTI’s Three-Step Tracking Process:

• Detailed Observation: You’ve already built the skills to make accurate observations, and separate your observations from your interpretation.

• Master Listing: Consider the potential animals who may have left the track or sign, and make a master list of choices for species identification.

• Analytical Case Building: Synthesize your observations with evidence from the field to create your best hypothesis, given your current skill level. You may end up with more than one candidate!

Using this process not only streamlines your ability to arrive at evidence-supported answers, it also uncovers holes in your knowledge—which makes it a highly effective teaching tool in and of itself! Weekend 2 will cement your observation skills while laying the foundation to move forward in your tracking journey.

Weekend 2 includes:

• Extensive field time: Immediately apply the process in real tracking settings. We'll spend most of our time out in the desert, putting our new skills to use.
• Progressive skill reinforcement: Observation skills are at the heart of using the tracking process, so we’ll make sure to spend plenty of time honing what we learned in our last weekend together.
• Practice, practice, practice: Once we’ve introduced the process, we’ll have ample opportunity to use it in the field. By the time you leave, you’ll feel confident in applying the process on your own time.

• Mentorship, personal instruction, and a community feel: Small class size ensures that you’ll get all your questions answered on the spot, and makes for great group dynamics.

By the close of Weekend 2, you’ll have the ability to use your reinforced observational skills to drive a highly effective tracking process. By focusing on raw visual input, and learning to separate this from our interpretive overlays and emotional projections, you will have laid the groundwork for an accurate and reproducible tracking practice. This will open the door to the real work of identifying and interpreting animal track and sign—and ultimately learning to read the stories of wild animals on the landscape.

Weekend 3

Animal Gaits and Biomechanics

Movement Matters for Understanding Behavior

April 3 - 5, 2026

Julian, CA—Mountains and Foothills of San Diego County 

During Weekend 3, we will:  

• Build a strong foundation in understanding animal biomechanical movements, and learn what this means for animal behavior. 
• Learn when gait changes matter, and when they don’t! Not every change in gait indicates a change in animal mindset. This weekend will provide a framework for knowing when to pay attention to changes in the tracks on the ground.
• Introduce the concept of baseline gait, and learn which gaits are most commonly used by which species. This can be a highly effective way to ID a trail to species when other factors, such as foot morphology, are difficult to interpret.
• Use Your brain, intuition, and body to deeply integrate gait studies into your tracking practice. Everybody learns gaits a little differently, and we have a repertoire of exercises to fit your learning style.
• Get more practice! Dirt time is the key to improving your tracking skills. During our extended weekends together, we spend almost all our time where it matters—in the field!

After Weekend 3, you’ll be able to discuss the two basic types of gaits, understand what they look like when you see them in animal trails, and make some fundamental interpretations about what the animal was doing, thinking, and feeling. You’ll have new language to talk about track patterns, and understand how these patterns relate to the ways that animals move across the landscape.

By understanding the patterns of tracks left behind by animals moving in their baseline gaits, we'll have built the skills to use gait to help discern between different species when the tracks themselves are difficult or impossible to ID.  With that knowledge, you’ll be able to apply your understanding of baseline gaits to intuit how changes in track patterns help interpret changes in animal behavior—such as hunting, feeding, bedding, evasion, communication and territorial marking.

Weekend 4   
Decoding The Tracks

The Art of Clear Track Identification and Foot Morphology

April 24 - 26, 2026

Ventura County, CA—Cuyama Valley

The Cuyama Valley area weaves diverse high desert terrains with riparian corridors and rocky oak-scrub canyons. At the end of April, we can expect weather variations, ranging from frosty mornings, to hot sunny days. We'll take advantage of some of the best tracking substrates in Southern California—this area has a long history in the North American wildlife tracking community, and for good reason!

Black bears and mountain lions are the apex predators here, and the landscape abounds with their sign. We'll also see ample evidence of coyotes, foxes, and bobcats, as well as myriad smaller animals, all the way down to tiny harvest mice.

Understanding foot morphology (foot shape) is the key to accurate track ID. Each species’ foot has evolved a unique shape, precisely matched to the way the animal makes its living on the landscape. Our ability to recognize the distinct morphology of each species’ foot is a foundational element of reading the stories of the wild. Once we’ve learned what the tracks look like when they’re clear and detailed, we can distill the diagnostic visual elements from them, and hone our ability to make confident, accurate identifications even when tracks are old, vague, and weathered.

Deep tracking knowledge relies on building a mental database of images from your time in the field. This weekend will focus on intentionally building or adding to your database to make your track ID faster and more accurate.

Weekend 4 will: 

• Compare and contrast foot morphology. By using side-by-side comparisons, we start to group animal tracks by taxonomic order and family, giving us the ability to move more quickly through our identification process. Grouping information into broad categories is a powerful tool for learning. 
• Reverse engineer the animal’s life history using the features of the foot. When we understand how morphology relates to life history, we more deeply know the animals we track. For example, long claws indicate digging or climbing prowess, so when they’re present, we can make informed hypotheses about the animal’s lifestyle.
• Explore animal niches and adaptations: Explore unique adaptations in animal feet, such as the reduced or missing first toe, and what these features reveal about an animal’s behavior.
• Reinforce visual observation: When tracks are indistinct, we may need to rely on overall track shape and other subtler, more intuitive features. We will explicitly review these features to create a mental database of search images to help us ID obscure tracks.
• Practice and consolidate our skills:  Each weekend includes time to review what we’ve already covered, and synthesize our experiences with the new material. This is vital for durable, long-term learning.

When Weekend 4 is finished, you'll have the vocabulary and skills to accurately talk about the anatomy of animal feet, and will understand how the anatomy relates to the animal’s natural history. You will have amassed a large set of images for your mental database to use in track ID in the future. Your visual perception will be honed, and you’ll have ample practice looking at the shape and proportion of tracks, to aid in ID when the tracks are partial, weathered out, or unclear.

By using the lens of foot adaptation to understand behavior, your understanding of animal life history will be broadened, and you’ll have practical field experience with tracks, sign, and behavior that reinforces these concepts.