How much are you missing when you walk through the woods?
The natural world is full of clues, but much of the evidence around us often goes unnoticed. A faint impression in the ground, a disturbed leaf or a broken stem may seem insignificant in isolation. Yet, when we recognise and understand them in context, small details can reveal a great deal about the animals and people moving through an environment.
During everyday life in our modern world, we become accustomed to filtering out much of the information reaching our senses. Bustling streets, noisy workplaces, information-packed screens, advertising everywhere and a multitude of other demands on our attention make this almost a necessity. Often, we’re not even aware of how much we’re ignoring.
And these habits don’t automatically disappear when we step into the woods. Bird calls become background noise. Subtle movements go unnoticed. Tracks, scents and disturbances in vegetation escape our attention, even when they’re right in front of us.
Becoming more observant, noticing small but significant details, and understanding them in context will transform how you experience the outdoors. Tracking and nature awareness begin with learning to notice these details, understand their significance and connect them to the bigger picture.
Our six-day Tracking and Nature Awareness course will help you develop these abilities through practical exercises, systematic tracking techniques and close observation of the natural environment.
You’ll learn not only to recognise and interpret the evidence left by wildlife and people, but also to better understand the wealth of information constantly available through your senses.
Whether you’re interested in bushcraft, wildlife, hiking, camping, or simply spending time outdoors walking the dog, you’ll leave with practical skills that reveal a whole new dimension to the natural world, enriching your understanding of the places you explore and the wildlife that inhabits them.
Recognising Animal Tracks and Sign
Wild animals frequently leave evidence of their presence even when we never see them.
Footprints, feeding signs, droppings, hairs, feathers, digs, scrapes, flattened areas and other subtle disturbances, as well as regular animal trails, can reveal which animals use an area and offer fascinating insights into their activities.
We’ll spend time learning to find, recognise and identify the tracks and signs of British wildlife, including deer, foxes, badgers, rabbits and other animals found in the local area.
You’ll develop a better understanding of where to look for sign, how to distinguish between tracks left by different animals and what feeding and other signs can reveal about their behaviour.
During the course, we’ll also focus on the traces people leave as they move through the environment. Footprints, disturbances and more subtle signs can tell us where someone has passed, even when their tracks are far from obvious.
Learning to recognise these details adds a new dimension to familiar woodland walks. Places that once seemed quiet or empty begin to reveal how extensively animals and people use them. From here, we can move from recognising sign to following it.
Learning to Follow a Trail
Recognising individual tracks or signs is one thing. Following a trail left by an animal or human across varied terrain, also known as trailing, is a different but related skill.
A trail may have clearly visible tracks in soft mud but become increasingly difficult to follow as it crosses grass, leaf litter or firmer surfaces.
You’ll learn the systematic methods experienced trackers use to locate, follow and maintain contact with a trail, even when the signs become faint or intermittent.
We’ll introduce practical techniques for detecting subtle disturbances, establishing direction of travel and following trails through different types of terrain.
You’ll also learn how to recover a trail when contact is lost, how to avoid common tracking mistakes and how to work effectively with others when following difficult sign.
Alongside these systematic techniques, we’ll explore how experience, knowledge of the environment and an understanding of likely movement can help you anticipate where a trail may lead.
Tracking is a skill that rewards patience, curiosity and practice. The techniques you learn will give you a strong foundation for continuing to develop your abilities long after the course.
Developing Your Nature Awareness
You can spend years walking through woodland without realising how much information you’re overlooking.
The calls and behaviour of birds, the sound of movement through leaf litter, and changes in the sounds and activities of other wildlife can all tell us what’s happening around us. But you must tune into this information.
Nature awareness is about developing a different quality of attention. It’s about becoming more receptive to what’s happening around you, being present in the environment, and allowing yourself to notice things that might otherwise pass you by.
It’s also about learning not to become so absorbed in your own thoughts, plans and distractions that the natural world becomes little more than a backdrop to whatever is going on in your head.
Throughout the course, we’ll help you develop this more attentive state of mind, become more conscious of the information reaching your senses, and better understand the significance of what you detect.
We’ll also explore how animals perceive their surroundings and how their senses and behaviour differ from our own.
As your awareness develops, familiar places can begin to reveal surprising amounts of new information.
Moving Quietly, Stalking and Concealment
Being observant is one thing. But we also need to learn to move through the woods without unnecessarily disturbing the wildlife around us.
Learning to move quietly and use natural cover effectively can greatly improve your chances of encountering and observing wildlife.
You’ll learn practical techniques for moving more stealthily, using vegetation and terrain to conceal your movements, and avoiding the sights, sounds and other cues that might alert animals to your presence.
We’ll explore how factors such as your silhouette, clothing, movement, wind direction and the available cover influence how easily you can be detected.
These skills are useful not only for wildlife watching but also for developing a greater awareness of your own presence and impact in the natural environment.
Watching Wildlife in Its Natural Environment
One of the most rewarding ways to put your developing observation and quiet movement skills into practice is to spend time watching wildlife. During the course, we will use our observation and stalking skills by heading out to look for wildlife in the surrounding woods and countryside.
The woodlands and surrounding countryside in the course area are home to fallow and roe deer, along with badgers and a wide variety of birds and other animals.
We’ll make time to head out in search of wildlife, giving you opportunities to practise spotting animals and observe their behaviour without unnecessary disturbance.
Depending on conditions and wildlife activity, we may also explore the woods towards dusk, when different animals and birds become active.
These experiences give you a chance to apply your developing skills while enjoying the simple pleasure of watching wildlife go about its activities.
How These Skills Enrich Your Bushcraft and Outdoor Experiences
Tracking and nature awareness aren’t skills reserved for hunters, wildlife researchers or safari guides.
These skills offer something to almost anyone who spends time outdoors.
A familiar woodland walk can take on a different character when you start recognising which animals use particular trails, understanding the bird calls around you, or noticing subtle signs of where someone has previously camped.
Learning to notice and understand these things opens up possibilities that extend well beyond tracking itself.
If you enjoy wildlife watching, recognising tracks, trails and feeding signs can help you discover where animals are active and where you might have the best opportunities to observe them.
If you practise bushcraft, developing your powers of observation can help you recognise useful natural materials, understand your surroundings and make better-informed decisions about how you use a particular location.
If you enjoy walking, camping or exploring the countryside, you’ll begin to discover details and signs of activity that previously passed you by, even in places you know well.
And if you’re particularly interested in tracking, the systematic techniques taught on the course will give you a practical foundation for following trails and developing your abilities further.
There’s also a benefit that goes beyond any particular outdoor activity. You’ll feel more comfortable with what’s normal and more at home in the environment.
As your skills and experience develop, you become increasingly familiar with the sounds, movements, patterns and signs that characterise a natural environment. You’ll recognise what belongs there, what has changed and what those changes might mean.
It’s a different level of familiarity with the natural world, and it keeps developing every time you venture outdoors.
Once you have learned the fundamentals of tracking and nature awareness, it is as if a layer of frosted glass has been peeled away; you will see the natural world with a whole new level of clarity and detail.
Six Days Immersed in Nature
Our Tracking and Nature Awareness course offers six days of practical learning in the woods and countryside of East Sussex.
You’ll develop your skills through a combination of instruction, observation and enjoyable practical exercises, with plenty of opportunities to apply what you’re learning straight away.
The course suits people with a wide range of outdoor experience, and you don’t need any previous tracking knowledge to attend.
Alongside the practical skills, you’ll have the chance to step away from the usual demands of everyday life, spend time outdoors, and learn alongside people who share your curiosity about the natural world.
You’ll leave with a solid foundation in tracking, improved observation skills, and a range of practical techniques you can keep developing and using for years to come.
Trackers are trained, not born.
What People Say About The Tracking & Nature Awareness Course:
“I absolutely loved this course. It was relaxed and I felt that I had time to do everything, this gave a great learning environment for me. The content was great and as usual the delivery was excellent. I can’t say enough good things about Paul, James and Phil. What a great team! Their knowledge was clear and the enthusiasm that they had for the subject shone through. They’ve definitely given me the tracking bug. The exercise on the final day was brilliant, the highlight of the course.”
Mike Taylor, Nottinghamshire.
“I really enjoyed the course and would recommend it to anyone interested in wanting to discover more about the outdoors. The instruction was first class, in content and delivery. I can’t think of a single thing to add as a way of improving the experience. It has inspired me to follow more trails and keep on trackin’! Thanks again to Paul, James and Phil.”
Ste Tomlinson, Cheshire.
“Excellent course, first class instruction and easily the best I’ve attended. Phil and James were considerate and very knowledgeable assistant instructors. I will definitely recommend this course to anyone interested in tracking and am really looking forward to signing up with Frontier again in the coming year. All the best and many thanks again to Paul, James and Phil.”
Matt Tyler, Berkshire.
“It’s difficult to highlight just one or two areas of the course as the “best bits” as there were many aspects of the course that I enjoyed. The tracking exercises probably were my favourite, as this was the implementation of everything we had learned and I can see how this can form the foundation of tracking animals, which is no doubt more challenging than following footprints. To flip this on its head and say is there anything in the course that seemed superfluous or unnecessary – I really don’t think so – if I think about each individual element I can see how it was structured to build up to the final exercise. And the games were fun – normally we simply do not go out into the woods at night and actually it’s pretty cool.
Some specific observations about attending this course…
- it’s just a lot of fun to be in the woods, learning new skills and especially if you have any interest in nature. Very little previous skills are required here – it is really a course many people could easily do and in reality it’s like a series of games and mini challenges – it connects us with a more playful side of our characters.
- mindfulness, awareness, focus, being present – it’s difficult not to get a bit new age-y here, but the course really does get you out of the stresses of a our modern digital culture, and helps you slow down and smell the roses (or fox scat if that takes your fancy).
- community and companionship – working in groups with your fellow students is a lot of fun, and also there is a lively friendly atmosphere between the teaching staff and participants. You can make friends with people with like minded interests and also learn from their experiences too.
For me, the main gains from this course were the ability to stop and make a conscious effort to observe and sense my surroundings, plus the realisation that initially this can be a very slow exercise that will become quicker with repeated practice. It’s amazing what you can see when you take the time to do this – only today, close to home, I saw several broken bird egg shells (still to identify), some badger prints, a partial skull (deer or sheep not sure yet), rabbit prints (or was it hare, I didn’t really check the size carefully) and plenty of tracks (many badger but one which may have been something more like fox as the mud transference on to the grass showed prints rather than the wider track caused by the badger’s body low to the ground). Anyone with even just a passing interest in nature and / or bushcraft would enjoy this course.”
Howard Houlston, Oxfordshire.
Details of What You Will Learn: The Syllabus
Observation Skills and Sensory Awareness
- Developing observation skills for tracking and ground sign awareness
- Establishing a natural baseline and recognising disturbance
- Using vision effectively: search patterns, focus, and ground reading
- Applying other senses to tracking and situational awareness
Understanding Tracks and Sign
- Understanding the key characteristics of sign and how sign is created
- Using both ground sign and top sign
- Recognising conclusive and substantiating sign
- Understanding key sign and how it varies with terrain
- Understanding direction indicators and movement clues
- Reading sign in relation to substrate, terrain, and vegetation
- Understanding factors that affect tracking, including weather, light, traffic, and time
- Assessing relative age of sign and recognising limits of certainty
- Understanding blood spoor
Identifying British animal tracks and sign
- Recognising the footprints of common British mammals, including foxes, badgers, rabbits, hares and deer
- Identifying and distinguishing tracks left by different deer species
- Recognising animal trails and understanding how wildlife moves through the environment
- Identifying feeding signs, including those left by deer, squirrels and other animals
- Recognising droppings, pellets and other indications of animal activity
- Understanding where to search for tracks and sign based on animal behaviour and habitat
- Recognising evidence of deer activity, including browsing and antler-related sign
- Developing an understanding of the behaviour and habits of common British mammals
Systematic Tracking and Following a Trail
- Understanding what trailing is and how it differs from simple track identification
- Applying systematic methods for following track and sign
- Working effectively from last definite sign
- Maintaining discipline while trailing
- Building and maintaining a coherent track picture
- Avoiding common tracking errors but recognising when the trail is lost
- Applying lost-trail drills and casting techniques
Tracking Judgement and Teamwork
- Interpreting sign objectively rather than making unfounded assumptions
- Avoiding self-deception and confirmation bias while tracking
- Using terrain features to anticipate movement
- Tracking as an individual and within a small team
- Communicating observations clearly and accurately
Stealth, stalking and concealment
- Understanding the principles of stealth, stalking and concealment
- Using clothing, natural cover, shadows and terrain to reduce visibility
- Moving quietly through woodland and other natural environments
- Understanding how movement, silhouette, sound and scent affect detection
- Considering wind direction and weather conditions when approaching wildlife
- Developing techniques for observing wildlife and avoiding unnecessary disturbance
Wildlife observation
- Learning to locate and observe wildlife in its natural environment
- Using binoculars effectively for wildlife observation
- Recognising behaviour and movement that may indicate the presence of wildlife
- Developing patience and attentiveness when observing animals
Your Instructors
Your course will be led by Paul Kirtley, founder of Frontier Bushcraft, who has been teaching bushcraft and tracking since 2003.
Paul’s tracking experience spans both animal and human tracking, with training under some highly accomplished instructors from civilian and military backgrounds. He was first introduced to tracking by Ray Mears and subsequently developed his skills through extensive practice and training with specialists including David Scott-Donelan, Major Dean Williams MBE (retd.), John Rhyder, and James Steyn, FGASA Scout.
His ability to identify and interpret animal tracks and sign has also been independently assessed through the internationally recognised CyberTracker system. Paul holds Professional Level Track & Sign certification in Southern Africa and Level 3 Track & Sign certification in Europe.
Over the years, Paul has taught tracking and ground sign awareness to a wide range of students, from bushcraft enthusiasts and nature lovers to military, police and search-and-rescue personnel.
His approach combines systematic tracking methods with a strong emphasis on careful observation, practical experience and learning to think independently. Tracking is a skill that keeps developing with practice, and a key part of the course is giving you the techniques and understanding to keep improving long after the training ends.
Experienced members of the Frontier Bushcraft team support Paul throughout the course.
Because effective tracking instruction requires close attention to individual students and plenty of practical feedback, we deliberately keep group numbers small and maintain a high instructor-to-student ratio.
All the Other Details You Need to Know…
Clothing and Equipment Required
Clothing and Equipment Required
You don’t need to spend lots of money on specialist clothing or equipment for this course. What you will need is some basic outdoor clothing, camping equipment and binoculars.
Please don’t go out and spend lots of money on binoculars prior to the course. Your view of what to look for will undoubtedly change during the course. If you don’t have any binoculars of your own, please try to borrow a set from friends or family.
Your clothing should be muted, natural colours. Avoid bright colours as well as blue.
A full kit-list is available here and it will also be e-mailed to you with your e-mail receipt after your booking has been accepted.
Other specialist equipment will be provided for your use during the course.
Course Accommodation
This course will be conducted entirely outdoors, from an expedition-style base camp and you will be camping on site for the duration of the course. Camping is included in the cost of the course.
There will be a covered teaching area which also serves as a communal area for breaks. There is a fire, kettle, tea, coffee, biscuits and cordial available here.
Food
This course is self catered so please bring food enough for the week and a stove for cooking. If you have attended a course where you have been taught safe fire-management techniques and leave-no-trace, then you can cook over a fire. Even so, you may still want to pack a stove for occasions when you need more speed.
Experience Required
No previous tracking, bushcraft or camping experience is required to attend this course. All you need is an enjoyment of being outdoors, an interest in nature and a desire to become a tracker.
Availability and Booking: Tracking and Nature Awareness Course
Duration: 6 days.
Price: £797 including VAT.
Deposit: 25% on booking.
Suitability: 18 years and above.
Course size: 12 participants (maximum).
Location: East Sussex.
Course Meeting Time: 17:30 Day 1.
Course Finish Time: 17:00 Day 7.
Course Leader: Paul Kirtley
Frontier Bushcraft Tracking Course Dates:
16/05/27 – 22/05/27
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