ANIMAL TRACKING A LIVING ART: WEST COUNTY NATURALIST SAYS FINDING ANIMALS IS AN INNATE SKILL WE ALL CAN DEVELOP

Jim Sullivan, a 75-year-old naturalist who lives in the forests outside Occidental, has made a name for himself as an animal tracker.

A West County native whose family has been here since 1873, Sullivan teaches classes in the rare arts of discovering animal paths and listening to bird language. He also is an artist whose work is on exhibit at the RiskPress Gallery in Sebastopol.

We recently tracked him to his studio in Joy Woods west of Sebastopol.

How did you get into animal tracking?

I've always been into the outdoors. When I was younger, I hunted and fished. Even as a child, my parents recognized my love of nature and gave me a room to use as a museum. I filled it with snakes and bugs.

I ran into a hump in tracking and left it for a time. The hump was learning gaits. In a track, there are pressures and releases revealed. If you stand and turn, your whole body is involved and your track changes.

Tracking involves learning that, following scats and feeding signs to learn exactly what the animal was doing.

How does bird language relate to animal tracking?

Tracking is static, what the animal has done. Bird language is dynamic, what's going on in the natural world right now.

In ancient days, everyone knew bird language. We all still know it. It's learning the meaning of your sensory input. The brain is a meaning-making machine, and we've been hard-wired for four million years to track and listen. It's how we survived. We just have to tune into it.

Who are some known trackers?

There is a whole body of tracking lore. An Apache from the mountains of north Mexico named Stalking Wolf felt his tribe was no longer interested in tracking, and he traveled through South America learning from aboriginal people who still had tracking skills. He's a legendary tracker.

Tom Brown Jr., who runs a tracker school in New Jersey, learned from him. I got my certification in 2010 from Mark Elbroch. He is the evaluator for the Cyber-Tracker program.

What is Cyber-Tracker, and how do you get certified?

There is a man Louis Leibenberg who tracked with the Kalahari bushmen for 15 years to study their tracking skills. In the mid-1980s, when the Great White Hunter in Africa was disappearing in favor of people who wanted to see wildlife up close, not kill it, everyone realized they would need a trained guide program to get tourists up close to animals.

Leibenberg turned to the bushmen to help him design a way to evaluate it. That's how the program was born. It was a grueling two-day field test, really tough, to get certified.

By the way, Leibenberg had gotten touchscreens to the Bushmen and showed them how to use them as they track so data was going directly to satellites from the wilderness.

Now there is the best animal survey data possible getting recorded. There are just about 700 certified trackers in the world.

You said tracking is built into our psyche. Is that why it is important to you?

As soon as apes dropped out of trees, they became the best long-distance runners in the animal world and they learned to track. After hunters tracked, killed and brought home the game, they told the stories of how they did it.

Trackers became the storytellers, the scouts, the leaders. It took character development. They worked in teams. When I teach, I see people get it. They learn to decode sound, they learn to really listen.

It's about sensing. It improves memory. Tracking is an awesome metaphor, and metaphor is meaning. It's how the brain works.

What are your plans?

I am writing a book that will be published next year called "Signs of Passage -- The Culture of Meaning in Animal Tracking and Bird Language."

I've read over 100 books on cognitive learning to prepare to write it. In November of 2013, a friend and I will hold the first-every tracker-art show at RiskPress Gallery in Sebastopol. And I'll keep teaching people to track and listen.