Make Tracks

"If you spend your time searching for the next track, you'll have learned a lot about finding tracks but not much about the animal," he says. "But if you spend time learning about the animal and its ways, you may be able to find the next track without looking for it."

But how can we learn about the ways of wildlife if we don't seek out wildlife? By paying attention. We need to engage our senses fully -- in the same way that a deer catches every movement in the forest and picks up the slightest sound. If we are truly alert to our surroundings, we will realize that the forest is speaking to us.

"You'll never find a square yard in the forest," says Rezendes, "that doesn't hold clues about the wildlife within it."

Track without Tracks

I'm beginning to think that we're veering into some New Age version of backwoods Zen, which is a notion that I'm somewhat allergic to. But soon after we've shouldered our day packs and started our trek into the woods above the river, Rezendes is already backing up his claim: He begins to show us how to read the forest.

Tracking is best done in snow or after a hard rain, when the ground is muddy. It's unlikely, here in these dry woods of midsummer New England, that we'll find more than a few solitary tracks. But we don't need tracks to track an animal, says Rezendes. The forest speaks to us through animals' signs: incisor marks on the young branches of a hemlock reveal that a porcupine has stopped to browse; crayfish remains in raccoon scat show where the animal found food; matted vegetation near a stream or pond may herald the presence of otters nearby.

Five minutes into our hike, we come across our first sign: a thicket of witch hazel. The tips of the wild shrub's branches are bitten off -- frayed and rough-looking. The witch hazel is shouting something to us, says Rezendes: Deer have browsed here! Deer have incisors on only their bottom jaw, so instead of cutting cleanly through branches they tear at them, leaving the tattered stems that we see before us.

"Deer forage all along here," he says. "But this witch hazel is regenerating. If it wasn't coming back -- if the deer were hitting these shoots faster than the root system could replace them -- then that would tell us something too. A big witch-hazel dieback would mean that the deer population in the area is so large that it has a major impact on their preferred food.

"Sometimes," Rezendes concludes, "it's easier to tell what kind of animals are in the area by looking for the kinds of plants that should be flourishing here -- but aren't."

Look for Graffiti

We scramble down the riverbank to the water's edge and quickly find signs of beaver: gnawed tree stumps, birches stripped of their bark, and scent mounds -- small piles of decaying leaves and twigs. A beaver takes plant material from the riverbank, makes it into a pile, and secretes a yellowish-orange liquid (called castoreum) on the mound.

A scent mound, or post, we learn, is a territorial marker. It, too, tells us something: that beavers are homesteading the area. I scoop up a pile and take a whiff; it smells slightly of horse barn. The mound is old. If the scent post were fresh, Rezendes observes, we'd smell it from 30 feet away. And we wouldn't need tracks to know that beavers are claiming this stretch of river.

"The world of scent is as rich to animals as the visual world is to us," says Rezendes. "By building scent posts and defecating in certain areas, animals are declaring their territory -- not unlike the way street gangs stake out their territory by tagging bridges and buildings with graffiti. By leaving such marks, animals are saying: 'I'm beaver! This is my place!' or, 'I'm bobcat! I'm here!' "

Sensing that some of us might be a little skeptical, Rezendes tells us about an experience he had at nearby Quabbin Reservoir. He had spent a long July day sitting on one of the thousands of boulders that dot the shoreline of Quabbin, watching a pair of loons through binoculars. The next day, he returned to the same boulder, and there, in the exact spot where he'd been sitting the day before, he found coyote scat.

"That coyote had gone out of its way to pick my boulder out of all those thousands of boulders, and defecate right where I had placed my butt," says Rezendes. "Sitting there all day, with my scent oozing from my pores, I had left my mark on that rock: 'Rezendes was here!' So that coyote had put a bigger X over my mark, as of to say, 'Coyote was here!' "

The lesson, Rezendes concludes, is that even though we rarely see them, animals are constantly signalling their presence -- to one another and to us. You just have to look for their graffiti.