Winter Tracking II- Gait Studies- Why and How

What are Gait Studies? Gait refers  to the movement pattern the animal is using and the corresponding gait pattern is left for trackers to interpret. In human terms, walk, jog, run, sprint, sit, stand, kneel, etc, etc. Think of an action an animal can take and where its feet need to go, in what order, in order to do that movement. The pattern of tracks left behind is what we read to determine what the animal was doing.

Gait studies often intimidate our students into glazed eyes and forlorn stares reminiscent of my 10th grade math classes… We start throwing out weird tracker jargon and it starts to feel very conceptual and foreign. So I want to focus on a couple things, what can you learn to interpret if you put the time in to understanding gaits and some ways of going about learning them in the first place. The…