Read the ground before you look for the animal

Most of our mammals are nocturnal, shy, or both. You can walk the same wood for years and never meet a badger, yet the mud at the sett mouth will tell you how many went out last night and roughly how big they were. That is the pleasure of tracking: it turns a quiet walk into a conversation with animals you have not seen.

Your ground matters more than your eyesight. After rain, check gateways, tractor ruts, field margins and the muddy aprons at pond edges. In winter, a light dusting of snow is the finest tracking surface we get, though a hard frost will hold prints in bare mud for days. Look along the low winter sun rather than into it, so that every ridge casts a shadow. Photograph anything promising next to a coin or a pen for scale, then measure later.

Four questions to ask of every print

You do not need to memorise hundreds of shapes. Work through the same four questions every time and the list of suspects narrows itself.

• How many toes? Four toes usually means a fox, dog or cat. Five means badger, otter, hedgehog, squirrel or one of the smaller mustelids such as stoat and weasel.
• Are the claws showing? Foxes, dogs and badgers leave claw marks. Cats retract theirs, so a neat four-toed print with no claws is likely a domestic or wild cat.
• What is the pad like? Shape, width and the gap between pad and toes are more reliable than overall size.
• How is the animal moving? A walking animal places one foot after another. A bounding animal leaves clustered groups of prints. Measure the stride as well as the print — a small fox print with a long stride belongs to a large fox.

One warning: prints in sun-softened mud or snow "melt out" and grow by a third. Measure only crisp, fresh examples.

Fox or dog? The commonest mix-up

A fox print is roughly 4–5 cm long and 3.5–4.5 cm wide, with a narrow bridge of fur between the heel pad and the toes, so the pad sits neatly separated. The front edge of that pad is concave and the back edge carries three clear lobes. The claws are slender and pointed, and they often register.

A dog's print is broader and rounder, the toes more splayed, the pad less lobed and the claws thicker and blunter. Dogs also wander: they sniff, double back and cut corners. A fox on the move walks a straight, narrow line, placing each hind foot almost exactly in the print of the front foot, a habit called direct registering. Trail width is a good clue too — a walking fox keeps its prints within about 8–10 cm.

Badger: five toes and a heavy heel

Badgers are plantigrade, which means they walk on the whole foot rather than the toes alone, and the print shows it. Expect a broad, almost bear-like track 5–7 cm wide with five toes in a wide arc, long blunt claws and a big kidney-shaped pad, often with the heel behind it. Setts are usually ringed by well-worn paths, and badgers dig shallow latrine pits nearby — small scrapes holding dark, sometimes seed-filled dung.

Deer slots and the shape of movement

Deer leave two clean cleats, pointed at the front and rounded behind, with a ridge of pressed earth between them. Size gives you a starting point: muntjac around 3 cm, roe 4–5 cm, fallow 6–7 cm and red 7–9 cm, with sika somewhere between roe and fallow. Habitat is often more telling than measurement — a 4 cm slot in dense woodland is far more likely to be roe than muntjac if the range does not fit.

Walking deer keep the cleats parallel. A running deer splays them and, in soft ground, the two small dewclaws register behind, which is a reliable sign of speed. Sheep prints are the classic confusion, but they are blunter and rounder at the front and sit flatter on the ground.

Otter tracks at the water's edge

An otter print is unmistakable when you find a good one: five toes joined by webbing, a wide pad often showing a faint chequerboard pattern, and an overall width of 6–9 cm. Look for them in the mud or sand of riverbanks, lake margins and estuary creeks, usually in clusters rather than a neat line, because otters bound on land and place the hind feet close to the front.

Even without prints, look for spraint — dark, tarry droppings left on flat rocks, bridge ledges and grass tussocks, sweetly fishy with a hint of jasmine. In snow or on steep muddy banks, a smooth groove running down to water is an otter slide. Mink tracks are smaller and narrower, with more separated toes and no obvious webbing.

Start with one species near you, visit the same stretch of bank after every rain, and you will soon find you are reading the place rather than just walking through it.