A jar containing bird feathers. Field guides illustrating wildlife, their tracks and scats. An album filled with fur samples including rabbit, rat, and skunk.

These are some of the tools that educators use when teaching the skill of wildlife tracking. Sarah Haggerty, an educator at Piedmont Wildlife Center, said tracking greatly enhances an understanding of the natural world and strengthens our connection to it.

"Tracking unlocks a story in the land," Haggerty said.

Gumby Montgomery, another educator at the center, said many first-time students think tracking is all about animal footprints. "But it is a state of mind," Montgomery said. "You use your senses as acutely as you can and when you think you are exhausted, push further."

"The majority of our teaching happens outside," added Haggerty. "That is where the real art of tracking comes alive."

So we left the center's classroom and headed to a scent station, essentially a large sandbox in the woods, that Montgomery built to observe animal tracks.

To collect tracks someone smoothes out the sand, puts peanut butter coated sticks upright in it, and then the next day examines the marks left by visitors.

"One of the things that we say is that everything is a track. It means understanding that everything you see, hear, and smell is participating in telling you a story," Haggerty said. "All the animals that have come through have left signs of themselves and we can interpret and read them. The more you get into it the more you can see things that are invisible."

In the box and in the woods around the center, the pair has seen tracks from raccoons, coyotes, gray foxes, skunks, deer, mice, squirrels, and rarely, bobcats.

Next, we head down Leigh Farm Road toward an office development next to the center's property near the junction of Interstate 40 and N.C. 54. There an expanse of cleared, undeveloped land edged by woods is a natural classroom.

"One of the coolest things to find when we hold camps is a kill site," Montgomery said.

If a bird has been killed, the educators collect feathers to look for predators' marks. Mammals and birds can leave different marks. and these clues provide yet another way of narrowing down the story that unfolded.

Jon Young, founder of the Wilderness Awareness School in Washington states and wildlife specialist Mark Elbroch have inspired Haggerty and Montgomery, but "the animals are our teachers," Haggerty said.

Tracking camp

The N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission offers free monthly programs to the public and a summer camp focusing on tracking.

"We are here to help the public understand what careers are at the commission and what tools are used by those who manage wildlife," said Ann May, a wildlife educator with the commission.

The commission is located at the Centennial Campus Center for Wildlife Education on the N.C. State University campus, but only a half-block away are woods and a meadow. The commission's scent stations are created by pouring sand inside a large hula-hoop on the ground and applying fox urine as a lure.

"We also set up a remote camera," May said. "It is great fun for the kids to see the raccoons, foxes, deer, and opossums that come through there. We are trying to get a groundhog. We have seen one in person waddling its way back into a hiding place. One of our stations is close to a creek."

May teaches students how to look for bedding areas, and animal slides that go down into the river banks, signs that until she began to learn tracking she would have overlooked during her frequent hikes and camping trips. "In the past few weeks we have set up a remote camera on Lake Raleigh to try to capture beavers and river otters," May said.

The commission also offers classes in another technological side of tracking: telemetry. The commission has an ongoing study of six Eastern Box Turtles with transmitters on them.

"We show students how we find the animals and the data we record when we find them," May said. Data includes the coordinates of a located turtle's site, its body temperature, the air temperature, other weather conditions and a description of its surroundings. The turtles are being studied to learn more about how they move, their home ranges and their numbers in the state as concerns over habitat loss and road mortality grow.

Who is in your backyard?