What Walks This Way: Discovering the Wildlife Around Us Through Their Tracks and Signs
Did a red fox pass this way? Could that be a bobcat print there in the dirt? Do those tracks belong to a domestic dog or a coyote? Combining lyrical memoir with an introduction to wildlife tracking, What Walks This Way explores the joys of learning to recognize the traces of the creatures with whom we share our world.

The nature writer Sharman Apt Russell tells stories of her experiences tracking wildlife—mostly mammals, from mountain lions to pocket mice—near her home in New Mexico, with lessons that hold true across North America. With wit and compassion, she guides readers through the basics of identifying tracks and signs, revealing a landscape filled with the marks left by browsing deer, predatory weasels, and inquisitive bears, skunks, and raccoons. Closely observing these traces, Russell also finds community, a sense of place, and a renewed connection with the nonhuman world. She explores the health of mammal populations in North America and questions common wildlife-management practices, calling for new approaches that better reflect current understandings of ecology. Above all, What Walks This Way is a celebration of all the wild animals secretly, stubbornly, and triumphantly roving through our cities, suburbs, and countryside.
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What Walks This Way: Discovering the Wildlife Around Us Through Their Tracks and Signs
Did a red fox pass this way? Could that be a bobcat print there in the dirt? Do those tracks belong to a domestic dog or a coyote? Combining lyrical memoir with an introduction to wildlife tracking, What Walks This Way explores the joys of learning to recognize the traces of the creatures with whom we share our world.

The nature writer Sharman Apt Russell tells stories of her experiences tracking wildlife—mostly mammals, from mountain lions to pocket mice—near her home in New Mexico, with lessons that hold true across North America. With wit and compassion, she guides readers through the basics of identifying tracks and signs, revealing a landscape filled with the marks left by browsing deer, predatory weasels, and inquisitive bears, skunks, and raccoons. Closely observing these traces, Russell also finds community, a sense of place, and a renewed connection with the nonhuman world. She explores the health of mammal populations in North America and questions common wildlife-management practices, calling for new approaches that better reflect current understandings of ecology. Above all, What Walks This Way is a celebration of all the wild animals secretly, stubbornly, and triumphantly roving through our cities, suburbs, and countryside.
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What Walks This Way: Discovering the Wildlife Around Us Through Their Tracks and Signs

What Walks This Way: Discovering the Wildlife Around Us Through Their Tracks and Signs

by Sharman Apt Russell
What Walks This Way: Discovering the Wildlife Around Us Through Their Tracks and Signs

What Walks This Way: Discovering the Wildlife Around Us Through Their Tracks and Signs

by Sharman Apt Russell

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Overview

Did a red fox pass this way? Could that be a bobcat print there in the dirt? Do those tracks belong to a domestic dog or a coyote? Combining lyrical memoir with an introduction to wildlife tracking, What Walks This Way explores the joys of learning to recognize the traces of the creatures with whom we share our world.

The nature writer Sharman Apt Russell tells stories of her experiences tracking wildlife—mostly mammals, from mountain lions to pocket mice—near her home in New Mexico, with lessons that hold true across North America. With wit and compassion, she guides readers through the basics of identifying tracks and signs, revealing a landscape filled with the marks left by browsing deer, predatory weasels, and inquisitive bears, skunks, and raccoons. Closely observing these traces, Russell also finds community, a sense of place, and a renewed connection with the nonhuman world. She explores the health of mammal populations in North America and questions common wildlife-management practices, calling for new approaches that better reflect current understandings of ecology. Above all, What Walks This Way is a celebration of all the wild animals secretly, stubbornly, and triumphantly roving through our cities, suburbs, and countryside.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780231215992
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Publication date: 09/10/2024
Pages: 224
Sales rank: 232,968
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Sharman Apt Russell teaches at the low-residency MFA program at Antioch University in Los Angeles and is a professor emeritus at Western New Mexico University. She is the author of a dozen books and winner of the 2016 John Burroughs Medal for Distinguished Natural History Writing.

Kim A. Cabrera is a master tracker and well-known wildlife tracking educator.

Table of Contents

1. Ribbon of Life
2. Turn Your Dog’s Paw Upside Down
3. Coyotes Are the Original Aikido
4. Let’s Just Enjoy Foxes
5. It Almost Seems Wolves Should Be Allowed to Vote
6. We’ll Lift That Lion Right Off That Limb
7. Bobcat and Lynx
8. A Black-and-White Aesthetic
9. The Entangled World of Humans and Raccoons
10. Three Bears
11. The Sudden Beating of Brains
12. You Think You Know What the IUCN Is Going to Say
13. The Little Guys
14. Hooves
15. Skulls and Bones
16. A New Vision of Wildlife Management
17. The Evaluation
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
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