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Animal Tracks

Andy's guide to animal tracks

North America, Eastern Wood

Tracking animals can be a lot of fun…and hard work, too! You can spend hours following tracks, losing them, and then finding them again. If you’re lucky the tracks take you right to their owner.As you prepare for your animal tracking adventure, find out what animals live in the area. This will help you narrow your list of suspects! When you discover a track to follow, here are some rules-of-paw that will help you figure out what type of animal you are tracking:

• Four toes on each of the front and hind feet mean you’re looking at a track from the dog family, like my Bess or a fox, the cat family, like a bobcat or a lynx, or the rabbit family, like a cottontail or snowshoe hare.

• Four toes on the front foot and five toes on the hind foot means it’s a rodent, like a mouse or a squirrel.

• If the track has five toes each on the front and back feet it’s from the raccoon and weasel families, like a badger, skunk, or bear.

• If you find a two-toe track, it’s probably a deer, moose or elk.

Before you head outside to put your elite tracking skills to work, test your brain-power by guessing which animals belong to the animal prints on this page. Once you think you’ve got it right, click on each print to learn more about that animal.

Use Andy Camper activities to become an expert animal tracker! Start your own track collection, map the wilderness through the eyes of an animal, and build your own track catcher!

Start a collection of animal tracks. Learn all that you need to know about making a plaster cast.

Activity Code: AC 110-1