How to Track Bears

Series Summary

Animal tracking is an art, a skill that has been used by hunters for ages. The first trackers were innately familiar with their natural surroundings and had trained themselves to find clues to an animal’s presence. In the wild, uncivilized world, learning how to find spoor, or signs of an animal disturbance, determined whether or not you survived. Because early societies often relied heavily upon animals for many of their needs, hunter-trackers studied animal behavior, such as when migration or mating were to occur, what an animal might do in a chase situation, what they ate, and where those foods might be found.

Nowadays, many of us no longer practice these skills, because we have a ready supply of food and clothing, and we have built more permanent shelter. The art of animal husbandry has replaced hunting, and the great outdoors have become the great indoors. Barring the eventual collapse of society and a return to the wild en masse, tracking no longer serves our most basic needs…but it has applications that prove useful for today.

In this free instructional video series, our experts give you a field guide on how to identify various mammal tracks. The next time you go hiking in the forest, put these skills to use and see what mammals you can identify.

This series is an Equilibrio Films production.

Video Transcript

"Hi we’re Nick and Valerie Wisniewski on behalf of Expert Village.com. We would like to show you some ways to identify black bear tracks in the wild. For more information, you can check our website at www.walnuthilltracking.com. The black bear is a large member of the carnivora and it has 5 toes both on the front foot and on the behind foot as well. One of the features to distinguish front feet from hind feet in the black bear is that on the hind foot the heel pad often times registers sometimes just as a dot but sometimes connected to the palm pad. The negative space in between the toes and the palm pad makes a c-shape and sometimes you will get the claws to register but not always. If they do, look well forward of the toes and on the front foot the claws are very long and so if there is an indentation in the sand or mud, it will be well forward of the toe pads. We’ve laid down a trail that is probably the most common trail that black bears make which is called an overstep walk. An overstep walk, the front foot will touch the ground and then the hind foot on the same side will leave an impression that has traveled further than the front foot. In this pattern, it is moving a little bit faster than it would in a direct register walk but a black bear seems very comfortable in this particular gait. The strides are going to be anywhere from about 18 to 28 inches. In this case, this trail is about 23 or so from leading edge of one hind foot to leading edge of the other 22. The trail is fairly wide. Usually in this pattern, about 18 ½ inches to 13 ½ or so. In this case, this one that we put down here for you is about 12 inches wide so a fairly typical stride in a fairly typical trail width for black bear. The only other animal that you really could confuse a black bear’s tracks with would probably be a human being. "