Workshop description:

Monday 4^th, 9am-4pm, 10 participants. $95, no deposit, full tuition due at registration. Location TBD.

This full-day field workshop focuses on two connected skills at the core of effective tracking: precise observation, and a structured analytical process.

Instructor Jonathan Shapiro has earned three Professionals and two Specialists in track and sign. After a decade of field experience—and plenty of mistakes— he developed this specific method for sharpening observation and applying a consistent process, which he will share in this workshop.

Whether you're a beginning tracker, or have decades of dirt time under your belt, observation skills come first. They're what help you move from novice to experienced tracker, or finally get that 100% at a certification to earn your Professional or Specialist patch. Yet many times, we don't explicitly practice them, and this can hold us back in our growth as trackers.

Training our observation skills allows us to see subtle incisor marks on a tree branch, recognize nearly-invisible track morphology, or pull out complex gait patterns in a trail. We will dive deep into the specifics of observation skills—what they are, how we define them, when they're most important—and offer clear, structured ways to practice and improve them.

Once we've made good observations, we apply our explicit tracking process: a clear sequence of steps to organize observations, think critically, eliminate possibilities, and arrive at the most accurate conclusion possible. This framework will work on any track or sign encountered in the field, helping beginners build strong habits early, and giving experienced trackers a systematic way to revisit and solve tracking puzzles they might otherwise pass by.

We'll spend our morning discussing and defining observation skills, then use our afternoon to apply our observations within our tracking process. You'll leave with a full day of experience under your belt, and with strategies to carry this new skillset forward into your tracking practice once you return home. Weather permitting, our entire day will be in the field, working directly with the track and sign we find on the landscape.