Jonah Evans' CyberTrackers Mark Their Territory in Wildlife Counting Clash

On a foggy winter morning, the shoreline of San Diego’s Torrey Pines beach resembles a forensic crime scene investigation into the animal kingdom. A series of red, orange, and yellow flags mark fresh outlines in the sand around various bird, insect, and animal tracks and scat. About a dozen people in shades of green and khaki huddle around them, getting down on their hands and knees to stare intently. They are taking a CyberTracker certification field test through NatureTracking.com, one of a handful of private companies training amateur biologists to do empirically based animal tracking. The goal: Create a new, more strictly certified corps to do wildlife habitat studies for ecological assessments, the kind that could affect everything from land-use zoning for new developments to national and city park plans and animal protection rights. As one woman with a long braided rat tail later said: “You’ve never seen so many people excited about poo.”

This is a brand new class of science-adventure worker. For years local and state agencies have relied on everyone from volunteer citizen-scientists to park rangers and university biologists to tell them what is really happening in the greater outdoors. In April 2009, Jonah Evans published an article in the Journal of Wildlife Management called “Determining Observer Reliability in Counts of River Otter Tracks.” In it, he pointed out a simple fact: While the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department had spent more than 30 years tracking otter populations under county bridges, no one had ever checked their observers’ reliability. A survey of abilities showed a whopping 40% margin of error. What that will mean depends on how quickly the state can revamp its population-count practices and figure out the impact of the oversight.

“Because there is no formal training for the people who track animals some population counts might be inaccurate,” says Evans, who is now the head evaluator for NatureTracking.com, and the monitor for today's exam.

This discovery has led to a conflict between two factional tribes with different philosophies about how to solve the problem. There are the CyberTracker supporters, and what Evans calls “hocus pocus” holdouts, a pack using self-taught, ad hoc or spiritually-driven tactics that could lead to even more mistakes. And this divide has sparked a credibility war among granola intellectuals.

Case in point: At a recent International Society of Professional Trackers conference in the outlying desert, the country's top ground readers sat on the opposite sides of a lodge decorated with an enormous mounted antelope head. Jim Lowery, a popular field guide author and head of California-based Earth Skills tracking school, described his method of “pressure release,” studying footprint nuances to visualize what might have just happened. “It takes you into the possibility of being in the moment with the animal. You don’t need a whole system for it,” he said.

A CyberTracker evaluator, on the other hand, must score perfectly on the exam in two different regions of the country. Today’s test will be a true Man vs. Wild experience. It consists of a series of backcountry hikes that wind for two days through three habitats--beach, desert and hobo-infested freeway underpasses-- to simulate real field exhaustion. Anything on the ground is fair game, from a tire track to a discarded plug of chewing tobacco. And the questions generally get harder, moving from making basic species identifications to picking out the gender of a footprint, which foot might have left the mark, at what rate of travel--walking, loping, trotting--and, eventually, just, What happened here? “I really feel the definition of science is the quest for the truth,” Evans says. “What the policy makers do with that knowledge is up to them.”

On the beach, though, everyone seems a bit light on their shorebird knowledge. “What are chickens doing at the beach?” Asks Barry Martin as he stares uncomprehendingly at the footprint of a raven. Martin is the founder of the San Diego Tracking Team, a volunteer-based citizen tracking brigade that uses their training methods to contribute to the preservation of about 120,000 acres of animal habitat in San Diego County. But because of some lone ranger types refusing to adopt the CyberTracker standard, he’s afraid their results may one day be deemed unreliable. “Some people are still resistant to it," says Martin. "That is a liability."

Kersey Lawrence, a doctoral student in wildlife biology at University of Connecticut, stares at another circled bird-scratching. “This could be a tacheckapolo…  I just made that up,” she says. Later, when Evans tells her it is obviously a long-billed curlew track, she balks. “I never knew that existed.”