Yakima Wildlife Tracks and Signs

w/ David Moskowitz

Spend the day with popular author, photographer, outdoor educator and expert tracker David Moskowitz learning how to identify tracks and signs.

The signs of wildlife large and small are all around us. Spend the day learning to identify and interpret the tracks and other signs left behind by mammals, birds, and other wildlife in the Yakima area. This course will be entirely field based, and participants can expect to leave the day with a new appreciation for stories written into the ground and throughout the landscape by our wild neighbors. We will explore the actual tracks and sign we discover and go over techniques participants can use in the future for identification and interpretation on their own. Field activities may require walking on uneven ground and navigating obstacles in the field.

What to Bring
Clothing appropriate for a day in the field.
Lunch, snacks and water for the day.
Footwear that can get wet.
Notebook and pencil (recommended)
Tracking field guide (recommended)
Camera (recommended)

About the Instructor: David Moskowitz works as a biologist, photographer, and outdoor educator. He is the author of two books, Wildlife of the Pacific Northwest and Wolves in the Land of Salmon. He has contributed his technical expertise to a wide variety of wildlife studies regionally and in the Canadian and U.S. Rocky mountains, focusing on using tracking and other non-invasive methods to study wildlife ecology and promote conservation. He helped establish the Cascade Citizen Wildlife Monitoring Project, a citizen science effort to search for and monitor rare and sensitive wildlife in the Cascades and other Northwest wildlands.

David’s extensive experience as an outdoor educator includes training mountaineering instructors for Outward Bound, leading wilderness expeditions throughout the western United States and in Alaska, teaching natural history seminars, and as the lead instructor for wildlife tracking programs at Wilderness Awareness School.

David holds a bachelor’s degree in environmental studies and outdoor education from Prescott College. David is a certified Track and Sign Specialist through Cybertracker Conservation and is an Evaluator for this rigorous professional certification program.