Conference Presentation Descriptions 2025

Click here for presenter bios
Click here for the conference schedule
Register for the conference at this link

Here is a list of confirmed presentations for the 2025 North American Wildlife Tracker Conference, listed in alphabetical order by presenter surname.

Alexis Burnett (Earth Tracks)
On the trail of the Canada Lynx in central Ontario: Stories from our week in the north woods tracking and trailing lynx (and other animals) through the frozen, snowy forests
Earth Tracks guided a group of keen wildlife trackers and naturalists in Elk Lake, Ontario, for a week of tracking and trailing lynx (and other animals) through the frozen, snowy forests. This area is known to have a healthy and robust lynx population, and we were able to locate multiple animals during the time we were there. This experience was open to people of all experience levels and backgrounds and was designed to immerse the participants in an active and engaging tracking community. This presentation will share our collective experiences spent on the land and tell the stories of the tracks, sign and trails left by the animals that we followed.

Kim Cabrera
Strategies for Food Storage in Various Animals and Implications for Trackers
Knowing where and how animals store food for their survival can teach us much about the biology of those species. The ability to locate animals’ food caches can teach us how those caches can benefit not only the species that store them, but other species that may target those caches for their own benefit. Concealing and defending caches can take up much of a particular animal’s time. I looked at several northern California species and also conducted a literature review to learn more about these strategies and how we as trackers can use this knowledge to help us locate sign on the landscape and understand the bigger picture of the lives of these animals.

Asaf Ben David
Track Plates for Small Mammals and Citizen Science
Track plates are used to survey and collect data on small mammals using artificial track substrates, a technique developed in the 1940s by the U.S. Forest Service. This method is highly cost-effective for ecological monitoring and offers significant advantages for wildlife trackers aiming to follow the tracks of small mammals. Track plates provide versatile tracking opportunities, enabling monitoring in various environments, from tree branches to concrete sidewalk. In this presentation, I will introduce the tracking method, discuss its benefits for wildlife tracking, and share our efforts in Israel to establish a citizen science program based on the use of track plates.

Bob Etzweiler (Vermont Wilderness School)
Wild Turkeys: a Lifelong Obsession – A Year in the Life
Bob has been obsessed with wild turkeys since an early age. He’s spent a lifetime following, observing, photographing, and hunting them all over the northeast and elsewhere. We’ll look at a year in the life cycle of wild turkeys, with discussions on behavior and related tracks and sign.

Dani Freund (Trent University)
Video of a wolf killing a foraging beaver: insight into the mechanism underlying how wolves influence beaver foraging?
In September 2023, we opportunistically recorded a video on a remote camera of a wolf killing an adult beaver, providing direct evidence of how wolves kill beavers. The camera also recorded beaver foraging activity before and after the kill, providing a unique opportunity to observe changes in foraging behavior of the surviving beavers at the pond.

Dan Gardoqui (Lead with Nature)
Look Up & Listen: Applying Avian Natural History Knowledge to Track and Sign and Trailing Skillsets
Wildlife tracking in North America has a “staring at the ground” problem. When we hyper-focus on substrate only, we miss out on relevant, contextual information that is vital for accurate interpretation, especially when trailing wildlife. This presentation shares time-tested methods for using the world of birds to broaden and deepen our skills and awareness as trackers.

Daniel Hansche (SPUR WANDER)
Tracking Language and Culture: Communication as it Determines our Perception
This presentation is an exploration of the tracker’s approach to the question at hand and how the approach influences the answer. The approach, process, and quality of focus are ever influential, whether for better or for worse. For those who wish to hone their quality of attention and the way they relate to the world of tracking, Daniel offers insights and possibilities for more effective interactions with the questions we ask and the way in which we ask them.

Nate Harvey (Tracker Certification North America, A Tracker’s Trail)
The Doe in My Sights: The Hot Trail, Part 3
Research suggests that White-tailed deer are the dominant species of deer in North America because of the attention they give to their backtrails, which is where predators almost always show up first. Tracking, uniquely, shows us a variety of ways that White-tails relate to their backtrails, which often have to do with the animal’s sex, its role in the group and its individual experience with predators. As we learn to recognize those specifics, we understand more precisely how best to approach without alerting them, whether for pleasure or for hunting.

Shane Hawkins (Tracker Certification North America)
Foot Morphology as a Tracker Tool
Studying and understanding animal foot morphology is a powerful tool that is available to every tracker. Having a visual search image for an animal’s foot structure is a beneficial partner to a search image of a well-drawn accurate track image. Join me in exploring how animal foot photos correspond to track photos as a tool for animal recognition and to maximize track ID accuracy.

Lonner Holden (Connection Wave)
The Science, Art and Relevance of Storytelling in Tracking, and its Place in Data Collection and CyberTracker Culture – from publications and clubs to certifications
Storytelling and human evolution are inseparable. Storytelling accounts for a major role in how we learn to be more aware, collect more data and get all of our needs met – from basic biological to social and spiritual. Through science and stories, the place of storytelling as our superpower in the art and science of tracking will be explored, with tips on how to generate an inspiring and information-boosting tale.

Terry Hunefeld (San Diego Tracking Team)
How to use Free Internet Resources to become a Better Tracker
How to use free websites to research status and distribution of birds, reptiles, mammals and invertebrates to create local species lists. Where to find and study actual images used at previous TCNA certifications.  How to use filters to find peer-reviewed images of tracks and sign covering nearly any type of question that may appear on a certification. How to create bar charts to narrow down bird species by time of year and season for any region. How to use filters to find, download and study images of bird feathers and nests.

Ann Hunkins (Prescott College)
Tracking Badgers in the Bosque: Studying Population Density of American Badger in the Albuquerque Rio Grande Bosque Using Wildlife Tracking and Camera Traps
I will present our in-progress study of the population density of American badgers (Taxidea taxus) along the Rio Grande Bosque within the city of Albuquerque, NM. Badgers are understudied in general, and in the Southwest there is little data on which to base management decisions, since badger population estimates come mostly from northern ecosystems. We are deploying teams of local certified trackers to find badger sign of the known Bosque population in the city of Albuquerque and choose locations for scent lure-based camera traps ”facing down” to capture distinct markings on badger backs to determine individuals.

Kersey Lawrence (Original Wisdom, CyberTracker) & Jiska de Groot (University of Cape Town)
The Soul of Tracking Project
What is the Soul of Tracking? That’s the question that this long-term research project through the University of Cape Town, South Africa, attempts to answer. Four tracker-researchers have aligned to interview people from all over the world on how they learned tracking, how they practice it, and what it means in their lives. A pilot study using Grounded Theory has already revealed some interesting results.

Sandra Mitchell (Sandra Mitchell Nature Photography)
Of Bears and Plexiglass, Porcupines and Peaches, and Things that go Bump in the Night
This presentation will feature the firsthand experiences I have had while living in a wilderness homestead surrounded by 40,000 acres of protected land. Close encounters with many of Maine’s northern wildlife are common on my property, and many have had little exposure to humans and therefore are often unafraid. As such, I have been thrilled to have close up and personal opportunities to watch, study, and photograph the behaviour (and sometimes be the target of that behaviour!!) of these wild neighbors. In this presentation, I will talk about some of the more interesting, strange, amusing, and frightening encounters I have had.

Bob Ollerton (Southwest Online Tracking Training)
An Analysis of Track and Track Pattern Measurements of Symmetrical Gaits
Overlaps in stride length and trail width measurement ranges make distinguishing between direct register walk and trot difficult. The usefulness of track pattern measurements in recent tracking field guides varies substantially. Their distinction becomes clearer when front-track trail width and animal size are considered.

Juarez Pezzutti & Otavio Vulcão (University of Para)
The construction of a community-based wildlife monitoring system in Xingu Valley, Eastern Amazon
We intend to present and discuss the results of a local wildlife monitoring system based on senior hunters’ knowledge. The research is conducted in parallel with the Official Monitoring Program, which uses camera traps and sighting transects.

Sage Raymond (University of Alberta)
My den is your den: Interannual patterns of wildlife use at coyote dens in Central Alberta
In forested landscapes, cavities in trees and logs provide important shelter for numerous wildlife species, but some ecological circumstances (e.g., recent deforestation, dry moisture regime, intense wildfire) render such cavities rare, and animals may resort to using other structures for shelter, such as dens excavated by other species. In this study, my goal was to determine the patterns of use by various wildlife species at coyote (Canis latrans) dens. I found that nearly all mammal species smaller than coyotes present on the landscape used coyote dens. I will discuss the implications of these findings within the contexts of natural history, and CyberTracker certifications.

Rob Rich
Sign of the season: Can wildlife tracking support phenological research?
Phenology, the study of seasonally recurrent activity in the lives of plants and animals, is a vital indicator for protecting biodiversity. Cycles of animal birth, feeding, sheltering, movement, breeding, and death have evolved with the seasons, but rapid shifts in climate are decoupling interspecies relationships and ecological processes that took millennia to synchronize. Drawing on examples from work with martens, amphibians, and bears, this presentation introduces concepts and field methods to guide observers considering applications of wildlife tracking in phenological research.

Ahiga Snyder & Tanya Diamond (Pathways for Wildlife)
Hwy 17 Wildlife Crossing – A Connectivity Success Story
In this talk we will be showing how wildlife are using the newly constructed, and first of its kind, wildlife undercrossing in the Central Coast of California underneath highway 17. This project has over 10 years of research, and we will be showing the first crossings, which species are using the structure, behavior footage, and how tracking led us to enhancing wildlife connectivity.

Phil Sallaway, Ryan Crane & Shankar Shiva (San Diego Tracking Team)
San Diego Tracking Team: 20+ years applying track to preserve wildlife habitat
The San Diego Tracking Team (SDTT) is dedicated to preserving the wildlife habitat in the San Diego region through citizen-based wildlife monitoring and environmental education programs. We will discuss positive impacts SDTT has had over the past 20 plus years. how we collect our data, how we created our first impact report, our interaction and reporting to land managers, and how we share our mission with the public.

So Sinopoulos-Lloyd & Christine Phelan (Home Range Wildlife)
Canada lynx scrapes: Uncovering pedal marking behavior in North America’s ‘ghost cat’
We will discuss current evidence for hind foot scrape-marking behavior in Canada lynx and also present novel detections of this behavior from the extreme southern range edge of lynx in Washington’s North Cascades.

Brendan Stringer & Sophie Mazowita (Cold Hollow to Canada)
Local Trackers Partner with Landowners to Study Habitat Connectivity and Inform Stewardship
Cold Hollow to Canada (a nonprofit land conservation organization in Northern Vermont) assigns teams of volunteer wildlife trackers to monitor activity on large privately-owned woodlot parcels. Trackers are tasked with determining which wide-ranging mammals are present on the landscape, identifying their primary travel routes, deploying game cameras to capture engaging wildlife footage, and sharing this footage and information with the landowners. Here we detail this process, findings, and suggestions, from the perspective of two volunteers tasked with monitoring approx. 400 acres in Waterville, Vermont.

Nyn Tomkins & David Moskowitz
An Introduction to the Forelimb Bones of Mammals: Applications for Wildlife Tracking
Bones tell stories. Understanding the basics of mammal bone anatomy can provide a great deal of insight into animal behavior and lifestyle. This class introduces the bones of the front limb, focusing on general patterns and structures. We will cover foot morphology and its application to wildlife tracking, as well as explore the unique features of each limb bone, helping to deepen field skills in bone identification.

Joy Wang
Life in the City: Tracking Chicago’s Urban Red FoxChicagoans encounter coyotes quite frequently, while they seldomly see red fox (Vulpes vulpes)—until 2023, when a fox family settled down in busy Millennium Park. Join me on a two-year journey of trailing foxes on snowy days, examining prey items at the unlikely den site, and watching the athletic kits explore surface world surrounded by curious human eyes. Eventually, the fox family attracted an influx of media attention, visitors and photographers. Working together with park horticulturalists and urban wildlife researchers, I designed an infographic of guidelines to coexisting with red fox, displayed in the park.

Please note that the schedule and presenter list is subject to change due to unforeseen circumstances that may prevent presenter participation. We are expecting a full and enriching conference weekend but cannot guarantee the conference schedule.