How do trackers learn their trade??
I take it,skills are handed down to them from their fathers,but i have not seen any young trackers on the videos or photos.

In Africa, they're BORN with them.

From what I was told and have also read, the boys are responsible for keeping track of wayward cows and other livestock. When one goes missing, it his job to track it down and find it. Therefore, they must be able to discern one animal's track from another and follow very faint tracks as well.

In Usa there is a school by an ex selous scouts tactical tracking the name of the instructor is Scott Donelan the other is the famous Tom Brown.juan

Talking with a tracker with the PH as the interpretor, I asked the tracker (Ping-Ping) how did he learn. I don't know if he was giving me a load or not, but he told me his father started training him by having him follow beetles, his father would collect a few beetles and break individual legs off each one. He would then release a few of the beetles and tell him to go find a certain one, he had to tract the beetle with the left back broken leg, through the sand, and bring it back to his father. If he brought back the wrong one, his father would show him the track of the one he wanted and send him out again. He then progressed from there. Sounded good to me and I believed him. Interesting way of teaching.

quote:

Originally posted by Jorge400:
From what I was told and have also read, the boys are responsible for keeping track of wayward cows and other livestock. When one goes missing, it his job to track it down and find it. Therefore, they must be able to discern one animal's track from another and follow very faint tracks as well.

This is the story PH's have told me - makes sense.

I heard the same story as Jorge400. That the cows are turned out each day from the village and after school the boys are supposed to track each member of the families' herd and bring them back to the relative safety of their small corral by nightfall.

It seems like that would be a large responsiblity as a families' fortune may be their 5 or 10 cows. Lose a cow and lose 10 to 20% of the family fortune. That would make the kids pay attention.

Kyler

Young rural black lads are used as herders for their fathers' cattle / goats etc. It's not at all unusual to see a boy of 5 or 6 tending a herd. Come evening, the lad has to round up the herd and get them home, or face his father's wrath. The only way he can do this, is to know each individual animal's tracks, and go find it on its tracks.

in order to develop this skill by the age of 5 or 6, much of the child's play is centred around different aspects of tracking / bushcraft. If you think about it, the kid is born and raised in the bush. Just as you teach your kids not to play with electricity or power tools, this kid is taught not to walk on the spoor of a puffadder or mamba. On the other hand, python meat is a rare delicacy. Best the lad knows the difference, no?

One day around the campfire one of my German clients told me there is a professor in Germany who has been studying eye colour in bushmen and he finds that the tinting of the eyes acts as a kind of filter that lets them see tiny shadows or something like that that other people cannot see so easily.

I forget the details but it was specific to bushmen and the idea was that they had spent so much of their history on the planet tracking, that natural selection had kicked in, and had chosen an eye color that somehow made tracking easier.

Tracking is a lost art in North America but at one time it was widely practised in the American south west by desert dwelling tribes like the Apache.

Ernest Thompson Seton lived at the end of those days and he wrote a few books about it.

I find some African trackers to border on genius. The best of them are the finest field naturalists in the world.

I remember one day following a wounded buffalo over a granite mountain and seeing no sign of anything. The tracker lost the trail for maybe 150 yards and then he says, "he went through here" and it proved to be true as we later got the buffalo.

I said how did you know that?

He said," because of the testse fly."

"What tetse fly?"

He said, " come here" and he showed me a tetse fly sitting on the branch of a small bush coming out from a crack in the rock. He said, "Its full of blood. It was on the buffalo."

He then caught the teste and squeezed it and it was full of blood. This guy noticed all kinds of details that had nothing to do with scuff marks on the ground."


VBR,


Ted Gorsline

D@@n!! Now that's a good story--and I suspect it's the truth!

Ted,
Did you keep the tracker? There is a general opinion amongst PH's here that Tanzania does not have good trackers compared to say, Bots, Namibia, etc. What is your opinion?

It would be an honor to spend time in the field with a good tracker. I definetely would like to find a "master tracker" and take him under my wing so to speak (or the other way round ) just so whenever i go in the bush he can teach me something new.

We actually ended up firing and then chasing this guy and his entire family right out of the country because we found he was constantly poaching commercially (not for food)in the off season. Too bad because I really liked him. Nature's child.

I have never hunted with bushmen who are said to be the very best. I once had a tracker in Burkina Faso who in two years never lost a roan or buffalo track. Find a track and you find the animal.

The Waliangulu elephant trackers that Nigel Archer brings in from Kenya are apparently excellent.

With a few exceptions the people in Kilombero are not good trackers but they are good enough for buffalo.

VBR,


Ted Gorsline

A tracker is not born with the skill, he is tought the skill. Any person with the eye sight and will to learn tracking can be tought. It also help to know tour animal cause not all animals react the same when wounded.

My one tracker learnt how to track rounding up his dad's donkeys and cattle when he was young. I guess that's how most of them learned.

We had a father son team with us on our hunt. Dad was teaching the son. The other trackers learned the same way.

They all read Will's book.

465H&H

I don't think tracking is a naturally present skill but some people do have a better apptitude for it than others...

At the start of the Malayan Emergency, the SAS employed trackers from the local Iban tribes to track down the Communist Terrorists hiding in the jungle.. However within a short time, several members of the Regiment became very proficient in the their own right, so much so that by the end of their deployment, the Regiment is reputed to have produced trackers that excelled the locals, which is not bad for lads brought up in the "wilds" of the UK..

The Selous Scouts were another outfit which excelled in bushcraft and tracking...

Regards,

Pete

I'm of the opinion an excellent tracker must have three characteristics.

1. An intimate knowledge of the land he is tracking in.

2. An excellent understanding of what the animal likes and dislikes in certain circumstances.

3. The ability to identify unique spoor to confirm the thoughts behind 1&2.

Trackers that excel at 1&2 always excel at finding spoor to confirm their suspicions.

The majority of trackers probably develop their skills as youngsters when they are out poaching all the time

My PH on one hunt in RSA (Jan Dumon) has a tracker named Calvin who is half Shangaan and half Tswana. There is a little bit of friendly rivalry one it becomes obvious that there is going to be a difficult track of a wounded animal. Calvin is superman on the track, must have a doctorate in wild animal psychology and I would be willing to bet that the only animals he has never found were grabbed by a leopard. It is, for me at least, one of the joys of hunting in Africa to follow one of these guys after an animal.

I just returned from my first safari, and was quite impressed with the tracking abilities of both my PH and tracker. I shot a Blue Wildebeest that dropped blood pretty good at first, but then the blood was only a drop every 25 yards or so. They worked together and tracked the animal, even in the absence of blood. I was very impressed when we finally came up on my dead Wildebeest.

I hunted with a tracker in Zim who was clearly the “go-to†guy when things got tough for the other trackers.

One of the hunters in camp asked him how he got so good at tracking, he said that he tracked men during the war and that after you learned to track a man, animals were easy.

When I inquired as to how they learned to track , I was told the samething about young boys having to keep up with the families livestock. Watching my tracker, Jopson, in Zimbabwe, work was worth the price of the trip.

Here in Argentina i saw gauchos traking from the horse at a fast speed ,they told me their father sent them everymorning to track the cattle back thats how they learnt .Juan

All that has been said is true. A tracker learns the trade, even if they round up cattle.Thye trained me, my dad pitched in, and the more you hunt, the more you learn about the animals and there behaviour. The bushmen are legends, I can testify to that, and you get some realy good Tswana ones as well..

I had an English client once, and he was very impressed with the way the tracker got his wounded Zebra. On his question who teached the guy to track, he was very surprised to hear that I trained him. I am one of the white boys that grew up on a game farm, and we had cattle as well, and we had to track them with the black kids. It is all about how, and where you were raised, I think. It takes years to master, but you do get guys that pcik up on it faster than others. Most of the time it is because they spend the whole year in the bush doing it...

It is a sad but true fact that in SA, the true, natural, black tracker is a dying breed. More and more PH's start using, and rely on, trained dogs, as a sure way of finding wounded game.

www.infinito-safaris.com

Recently, I hunted Zim and had the pleasure of watching two young trackers (20's) track eles and dugga boys over hard pan, rocky outcroppings, heavy jesse, etc. This was when there was no scat to follow. Watching these guys for 20 days was a marvel. It prompted me to inquire about their abilities and learned that they come from a family of trackers, ie. grandfather, father, etc. So it is like anything else, you have natural ability and then you learn from the best.
The PH said these guys were very good and he expected them to even get better. The PH wasn't bad himself as he also did tracking along with the guys.
Sure makes a hunt a joy when you can track single animals over any terrain and see the team work.

Dak