Tracker Gathering Workshops and Clinics
Leader: Jonathan Shapiro
email: southwestwildlifetracking@gmail.com
Workshop: Seeing The Animal - Real-world Trailing Skills
Date: Tuesday September 8
Time: 9am - 4pm
Tuition: $125
Deposit: 0
Location: Outdoors all day...pack a lunch
Reservations: are a must to guarantee availability... contact Jonathan by email.
Maximum Participants: 5
Meeting Spot: Jonathan will email registered participants the meeting spot by 4pm the day before the event.
Seeing The Animal!
COURSE DESCRIPTION
Do you want to learn how to find animals on the landscape, instead of simply looking at their track and sign? Do you want to improve your trailing skills and get that next TCNA CyberTracker Trailing certification?
Come explore the ancient art of trailing, and learn to identify fresh tracks, follow the trail, and see the animal before it sees you. This skillset will radically change your relationship with your landscape and your perspective on animals and their behavior.
Our target species will be deer, since they're abundant on the landscape, and their hooves often leave clear tracks in woodland substrates. We'll start with an overview—awareness skills, track aging, and fundamental animal behavior—and then move directly into practicing the techniques. We'll search for trails, assess their age, and when we find a fresh trail, we'll follow it and interpret the animal's behavior while we learn techniques to get close to animals in the wild.
You'll gain experience seeing clear and obscure tracks in difficult substrates, interpreting gaits and connecting that to animal behavior, and specific awareness and movement techniques that will jump-start your trailing practice and allow you to find animals and understand how they use the landscape for feeding, bedding, and other behaviors. Appropriate for total beginners up through level III in Trailing.
Instructor Jonathan Shapiro was mentored in trailing by evaluator Nate Harvey for many years, and earned his Professional certification in Trailing in the spring of 2025. He also works with the CyberTracker Saola Project in Southeast Asia, teaching trailing skills to local trackers to support critically endangered ungulate conservation.
About The Leader
Jonathan Shapiro's home base is at the edge of a huge beaver wetland in Northern Vermont, and he travels and teaches tracking extensively across the US and internationally. He is the founder and lead instructor of the Southwest Wildlife Tracking Institute and the Fox Paw School, and holds many Cybertracker certifications, including 3 Professionals and 2 Specialists in Track & Sign, and a Professional in Trailing. Jonathan works with the CyberTracker Saola Project as a tracking consultant in Laos and Thailand, and is also faculty at Sterling College in Craftsbury, Vermont, where he teaches field-based natural history courses.
Jonathan's teaching style emphasizes deep connection with the natural world as well as serious tracking skills. He crafts his courses to help students develop both technical expertise and ecological awareness, and to learn the lives of the other animals on our landscapes and understand their stories. He believes that we were born to track: that creating this kind of relationship with our habitats—one that is both scientific and relationship-based—is part of forging deep, meaningful connections with our surroundings, and becoming fully human.
If you come to Jonathan's classes, expect to find a mix of contemplation, analysis, fun, mentorship, philosophical inquiry, and serious tracking skills. Please arrive with questions, and expect to leave with some answers and even more questions. When he's not out tracking, you can find Jonathan trail running, debating philosophy, hunting, paddling canoes, or reading books by the woodstove.
