I have bought the SAS guide to tracking by Bob Carss. I may aswell review it quickly as I finished it the other night.
At first, I thought that this could be a book aimed mainly at the military person wishing to learn tracking. Straight away though, Bob says that this book is not about the SAS, although a few stories from his days as a Trooper are thrown in thoughout the book. Also, no mystical powers will be revealed, but techniques to enable the uninitiated to grow into a decent tracker.
I continued to plow through the book absorbing as much of the information as possible. A lesson is split down and then recapped at the end of the chapter. The book does not start with tracking info though until a good way into the book.
A lot of the first third of the book looks at how the tracker needs to heighten his awareness of what goes on around him, how the 5 senses work and to take notice of what ALL of his senses are telling him, factors that attract attention, and how the tracker needs to strengthen his memory so that he remembers every minute detail he sees. This is improved by the use of Kims game and the Greek storage room, and it is these sort of chapters that makes you want to skip that particular part of the book and start looking at the track pictures of animals!! Persevere though, it must be important!
Once the book gets going you will learn the Track Pursuit Drill and the Lost Track Drill, everything in the army is a drill!!! They help remember how to deal with following sign, what to do if you cannot see the next sign and how to cast for the next sign without destroying any other sign. I don't know if this is what the trackers here on the forum do, as I have not had the benefit of their tuition or experience, but it sounds quite sensible to me.
The book also covers how sign can be aged by the weather, how false spoor (deception tactics) can be laid by an enemy soldier (military again) or how sign can be fouled by other animals/people moving across and over the sign you are following. Also covered is stalking techniques, the ability to move silently through woodland both by day and night.
Map reading is covered at the end of the book, along with human and animal prints. I found the animal prints to be fairly scant, there weren't many but it broke the groups of different types of tracks down into the various groups of walkers, ie. sole walkers or plantigrades, toe walkers or digitigrades and nail walkers or ungulates (this taken from the book!). These are then broken down again by the method of locomotion, ie. equal length limbs (horses), unequal length limbs (rabbit) short legs long body (pine marten) and short legs large body (badger).
Also covered is how some animals register, how an animal such as a cat places its' rear paws onto the ground where its' front paws were. The book covers tracking vehicles aswell, although I expect you'd have to be a quick runner to keep up!! Don't try this on the M25!!
All in all, not a bad book to get somebody on the road to becoming a tracker. It is the first book devoted to the subject that I have read, and I learnt a few things. The thing is, I think the book could have had a lot of the pages ripped out and still got the same info across. The book is the same size as the original version of the Lofty Wiseman book, so it won't fit in your pocket!!
If anyone knows of another decent book to get to build up my knowledge of the subject I would be grateful. I see there is a book on amazon with a foreword from Mr Mears that has a lot of good pictures of prints and "deposits" from various animals to be found in europe, I'm thinking that it may be my next purchase.
Animal Tracks and Signs by Preben Bang and Preben Dahlstrom, Foreword by Ray Mears
