How to Track Animals - How to measure strides in animal tracking

Hi! We are Nick and Valerie Wisniewski on behalf of expertvillage.com. We are here to talk about animal tracks. For more information, you can visit our website at walnuthilltracking.com. Here on the ground in front of us we have the tracks of what we’ve determined are a wild canine. We are not sure yet what wild animal made this but we have narrowed it down to two species; either an eastern coyote or a red fox. What we are going to do is show you how to measure the stride of an animal. The stride is basically how far an animal is stepping as it moves. Knowing the stride can tell you how quickly an animal is moving and in this particular pattern that we have in front of us we are picking out two tracks. Each one of these tracks is actually the imprint of two feet. This is in a pattern we call direct register where the hind foot lands in almost the exact same place that a front foot had landed and exited before the hind foot came down. When measuring, we use a tape measure and we will find the fartherest distance that one track has traveled and we will measure from the leading edge of that track including the nails so we will lay the tape measure very carefully down on top of that track where the nails have registered and we will stretch the tape measure out in this direction and measure straight down to where the nails registered here. When we do that, we get a measurement of almost exactly 20 ½ inches. Now that we have that information, we can deduce that this must be an eastern coyote.