Outdoor Tracking Handbook: How to Read Nature’s Signs

’This book reawakens something vital - a way of slowing down and truly seeing the world around you. It is not merely a manual, it is the authentic voice of experience and a mentor in print.’ Lieutenant Colonel Gaz Veacock MBA, Royal Marines

Ray Mears has accumulated his tracking skills over 35 years of practice in the field all across the world, from tracking the snow leopard in China to tracing dinosaurs on the south coast of England. Although he’s known as a TV presenter, he also works in a confidential capacity as a consultant to the police and other agencies. Here, he draws deeply from every avenue of an extraordinary life’s work, and passes on all that hard-earned expertise for the first time.

Illustrated throughout and including clear instructions interlaced with Ray’s own inspiring first-hand experiences, this book offers you a thrilling self-education in the art of tracking. Part 1, Basic Tracking, will give you the tools to identify tracks. In Part 2, Intermediate Tracking, you will learn how to follow sign left behind and in Part 3, Operational Tracking, you’ll start to piece together a fascinating wider picture of the specific circumstances around trails.

Outdoor Tracking Handbook is the only authoritative but accessible and practical manual of its kind. Here you have not only a go-to reference for professionals, from naturalists to police and military operatives, but also an essential guide for enthusiasts who want to discover the outdoors in a new way, and read the secret stories of animals and birds in the tracks they leave behind.

Ray Mears has become recognised throughout the world as an authority on the subject of bushcraft and survival. TV series including Ray Mears’ Bushcraft, Ray Mears’ World of Survival, Extreme Survival and Ray Mears goes Walkabout have made him a household name over the past two decades, but he has spent his whole life learning these skills, and founded Woodlore School of Wilderness Bushcraft over 35 years ago. He lives in Sussex with his family.