How to Track Birds

Video Transcript

"Hi! We are Nick and Valerie Wisniewski on behalf of expertvillage.com. We are here to talk about animal tracks and for more information; you can visit our website at walnuthilltracking.com. Here in the mud in front of us we’ve got the tracks of two birds. As trackers, we need to know about birds as well as about mammals. There is a bird track here and a bird track there. At first glance, they look very similar both in structure and in size but in fact these are two very different birds. One is a wild turkey and the other is a great blue herring. Size alone will not always tell you what animal left the track and this is a perfect example in front of us. This is a particularly small great blue herring probably an immature bird. This is an average size turkey track. There are several things about these tracks though if you look for carefully you can figure out which one is which. On the turkey track the hind toe which is track number 1 makes a line or an arc that lines up with this toe that is in the middle to the front. On the great blue herring track however, is asymmetry in the track. This toe which is toe number 1 in back does not line up with that middle toe. Even though they are parallel there is a jump that happens here. That little jump tells us immediately that that is a great little herring track. Knowing which one of these birds is where if you were a hunter gatherer might make a difference between survival and extinction. "