Workshop description:  Whether you're a beginning tracker, or have decades of dirt time under your belt, your observation skills and analytical process are at the heart of your tracking abilities. 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, and in our ability to learn the landscape around us.

High-level observation skills allow us to catch the subtle detail in incisor marking on a tree branch, see the almost-invisible morphology in an obscure track, or pull out patterns in a complex trail that permit us to interpret the animal's gait and understand their behavior. 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 you've made accurate observations, you'll need a framework to use them in order to arrive at an identification. This framework, or tracking process, is the explicit set of steps you use to analyze and interpret your observations.  We'll build an explicit tracking process that is designed to maximize your critical thinking abilities and help you arrive at the best possible answer for any tracking question you encounter in the field.

We'll spend our morning discussing and defining observation skills, learning how to separate them from our interpretations of track and sign, and practicing the fundamentals of this vital skillset. Once we've built our foundation, we'll use our afternoon to work out more complex observations and fit them into the framework of 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.

We'll spend our entire day in the field (weather permitting) and our subject matter will be dictated by the landscape. We may use our newfound skills to analyze feathers, tracks, gaits, marking or feeding behaviors, animal life histories, or whatever we encounter in the beautiful landscapes around Camp Ravencliff. This workshop is aimed at students of all skill levels, from first-time trackers to Specialists.

Instructor Jonathan Shapiro has earned three Professionals and two Specialists in track and sign, and has spent over a decade honing his observation skills and process. He's made a lot of mistakes along the way, and the lessons he's learned have helped him create the unique approach to observation and process that he'll offer in this workshop.