Wildlife Trailing Intensive

This course is all about building real practical skills in animal trailing. All of our time is out in the field, experiencing real dirt time in learning how to follow animals, read their behaviour and understand the landscape so you can predict their movements. Along the way, we may introduce track and sign as key tools and aids where relevant as in practice they are all intrinsically interlinked. Tracking is about spotting signs, making sense of them, following the trail, and ultimately finding the animal!

The training is broken into blocks to give you time to consolidate and practice in between. Trailing can be surprisingly mentally demanding and it is helpful to spread out your learning. Expect a good deal of time on the trail, personal feedback and advice for practice between sessions. By the end, you’ll have a deeper understanding of animal behaviour, the ability to anticipate movements, and the confidence to use your skills in all sorts of environments.

Trailing, more than any other discipline promotes deep ecological literacy as it pulls together elements from many environmental aspects, it is not merely following tracks on the ground. There is real relevance to bird language, knowledge of plants and terrain, weather and wind movement and especially animal behaviour.

Course Content

Using the CyberTracker evaluation framework as a guide, the programme steadily builds your trailing ability step by step. You will develop core skills like sign recognition, predicting animal movements, staying alert, moving with stealth, and making safe approaches all with tailored feedback along the way.

Although the main focus is trailing, we also weave in other skills to give you a fuller picture of the animals you’re following. You will get hands-on with tracks and signs from different species, learn to identify their food plants, aging of tracks, read bird and animal alarms, understand gaits, and practice general fieldcraft and stalking. We focus on ungulate species, but we will also explore how terrain, seasons and behaviour all influence the way you approach animals in general.

To keep things personal and focused, the programme is limited to a maximum of 5 students. Small group sizes mean more time on the trail, plenty of individual attention, and the best possible chance of real animal encounters.

Student on the Trailing Intensive course watching the deer they followed

Details

This course is run by John Rhyder who is certified as a Senior Tracker having scored 100% in both track & sign and trailing in specialist evaluations – the highest assessed level possible in the Cybertracker system. John is also an evaluator for the CyberTracker in both track & sign and trailing.

Sessions are out of doors and on the move at various locations.  We may be walking for extended periods on uneven ground and being in areas without regular toilet facilities, so a reasonable level of fitness and preparedness is recommended. If you have any questions or would like to discuss this further, please feel free to get in touch.

Fees

The cost of this programme is £1200 which can be spread over 4 equal payments.

Related Programmes

• CyberTracker evaluations
• Tracking workshops

Dates

• To be Confirmed, please contact us if you would like to be informed of the next date for this course.
• The course runs for 12 days over 4 modules

Booking

Please read the following information before booking:

• Terms & Conditions – by booking on to our courses you agree to our Terms & Conditions
• The Course Kit List

Please note these are self catered courses, we are not always working from our usual site for our tracking events and so do not normally offer camping. there are some excellent campsites close by which are reasonably priced.

You need to be over 18 years of age to attend this programme.

Course dates 2026

If these courses are full please contact us to be placed on a waiting list for cancellations. Should enough people express an interest we may run extra dates.