Dan the Tracker

Trees are the Earth's endless effort to speak to the listening heaven.
~ Rabindranath Tagore

Meg presented a reading facilitation today (wed 7/9) and opened with this quote. I love it and will commit it to memory. To me it means that trees are an organic expression of the intelligence/complexity of the living Earth. They extend like appendages toward the stars and heavens rooted in organic earth but reach for something beyond themselves beyond their world.

OK, enough philosophical pondering. Speaking of reality:

Wednesday, July10 was spent learning from a master tracker. We met Dan from whitepinesprograms.org at the Headwaters trail head. Dan is an AMAZING tracker. After the obligatory introductions we basically followed Dan into the woods and learned from him as he made several stops as we bushwhacked off the trail head. I have a pretty good feel for the woods and see a lot when I'm out there, but Dan is at a level where the woods speak to him a t every glance. His eye for detail is impressive. Of course we found abundant deer sign and some pretty neat porcupine sign including an active den (no porky in it when we were there) and we trailed the porky for quite a way, which was fun. But we also found flying squirrel sign, many wood frogs and perhaps the most impressive to me for the detail aspect of it was gastropod (snail) sign on a white birch. The snail or slug left a tell tale trail (say that a few times fast) on the side of a white birch. It looked like a hundred individual little oval foot prints with a few small lateral bars within them. These were the tracks from the snail "foot" that it uses to propel itself as it grazes on algae on the birch bark.
We also came across a thrush fledgling (hermit or wood) and a red eft stage of a red spotted newt. All told a successful tracking session and this was only in a couple of hours. It would blow my mind what we'd find if we spent an entire day with him. That, in fact is something i would definitely like to do. Many days would be even better. I am hoping I can work some sort of apprentice work with Dan into my MA EE program. The skill learned from him would be a great opportunity for me to bring to my students at KHS.