“Tracking is a journey through a landscape in which relationships are formed between the tracker, the quarry, the environment and time. These relationships can become extremely personal” – Pablo
Please ensure you read the safety and security and kit list pages on the right.
Welcome to Woodlife’s Forest Tracker Course.
This promises to be an extraordinary course, which brings all the previous tracker courses together. It will expand and stretch your tracking skills to greater heights.
It promises to deliver not just nature awareness and fieldcraft skills to new levels but also introduces more tracking techniques to help you achieve your aim including bracketing, jump tracking, cadence tracking and other tracking techniques.
We will also cover paleo-movement in great depth, enhanced zone-in (immersion) techniques and advanced wildlife observation techniques.
Technically, we will also be reviewing gait patterns and looking at bird’s tracks and signs and bird behaviour.
But it is the trailing techniques that we will be concentrating on.
Trackers working for the US Army during the Apache wars were originally called ‘Trailing Men’.
The San used perseverance hunting techniques to trail their prey and run them down to exhaustion.
You will need to have some experience of tracking and wild-camping by having attended either our Wilderness Immersion Course or Woodland Tracker Course to attend this course.
Kit
Please look at the general kit list page on the right-hand menu. As with the Wilderness Immersion Course, you should either bring a lightweight, low-profile shelter (tarp, bivvi bag or poncho) as well as your basecamp set up; but this time be prepared to move about.
Be advised to dress for the season, of course. You will be provided drinking water and you can always replenish at basecamp. You must bring your own water containers. It may be advisable to bring dry rations for the Saturday exercise. Pack light!!
Itinerary
On Friday, after arrival, set up and briefing, we will spend a session revisiting dark adaptation techniques and look at night tracking.
On Saturday we will spend the morning and part of the afternoon completing sessions around the basecamp area. Later in the afternoon, after a thorough briefing and preparation you will be let loose within Hatfield’s amazing medieval hunting forest (courtesy of the National Trust) for a tracking/stalking/trailing/surveillance exercise.
On Sunday you will continue trailing and observing the wildlife throughout Sunday morning returning to base-camp around 11 o’clock for a full debrief.
On return to basecamp, we will have an in-depth debrief and cover some more areas. We will also look at the technical challenges of bird tracks and sign. We will strike camp about 2-2:30pm
Cooking on a stove may give you away, so you are advised to bring high-energy dry food or your favourite equivalent.
Remember: A hungry hunter makes a good tracker!