Dan Yacobellis is a successful contractor in Columbia County, known as a mellow guy. But put him in a forest and he is liable to fling himself on the ground, scratch at the snow with his bare hands, and leap happily into Japanese barberry.
Yacobellis is a wildlife tracker, one of a loose-knit group of local experts who practice an ancient art and see the forest differently from the rest of us.
On a freezing Sunday in February, a small group of apprentice trackers gathered in the Taghkanic Community Forest just East of Lake Taghkanic State Park for an expedition led by Yacobellis and the Columbia Land Conservancy. All ages were present, including one very young enthusiast in a backpack who seemed more intent on chewing his tracking card than following animals.
At its heart, wildlife tracking is science, storytelling, and imagination. A tracker examines footprints and other evidence left by animals, then uses logic to reconstruct a story. With practice, a skilled tracker can determine whether an animal was hunting, mating, or traveling from the clues it leaves.
“Every square yard of forest contains some sign of an animal,” Yacobellis said to the group. “It’s up to us to find it.”
Tracking has been called one of the first sciences. It’s hardwired into the human brain, and was essential to the survival of our earliest ancestors. Today, we no longer have the feast-or-famine need to stalk an animal, yet the curiosity and the questions remain. Why else would grown men and women — myself included — be crawling around on the icy forest floor on a freezing February day?
The recent snowfalls are heaven for an animal tracker, revealing myriad tracks across the landscape.
When we spotted a track, Yacobellis invited us to ask basic questions. “First make some basic observations without making any assumptions,” he said. “What direction is the animal going? How many toes does it have on its foot? What is the shape of the print? Is there a negative space in the animal’s pad?” (In canids like coyotes, this negative space forms an ‘x.’)
Peter Klebnikov / The New Pine Plains Herald
Expert trackers are good at sign tracking — discovering evidence left by animals, such as a nibbled branch, a clutch of feathers, or a gnawed pinecone. In time, other questions emerge. Who made the tracks and when? What was the animal doing? Where was it going, and why? Where does it sleep? How does it move?
“It’s amazing how much you can tell about the life of an animal just by looking at its tracks, “ said Yacobellis. “You can find where the animal slept, how it was feeling, if it was tired, even its age.”
Legendary trackers in American history are renowned for opening up vast swaths of wilderness for white settlement. They’re also known for spinning tall tales, like James Beckwourth’s claim of surviving an Indian attack by sprinting 95 miles nonstop through the mountains. Yacobellis is not like that. “Our observations are based on empirical evidence,” he said with a smile.
Knowing some basic laws of nature is helpful. Each animal has different sized feet, Yacobellis explained. The larger feet are the ones where the animal carries most of its weight. A dog has larger front feet, for example, while bears have larger back feet. The front of the foot makes the deepest imprint. A quadruped moves in scissor movements. If it is walking, its legs are scissoring; if it’s running, then it’s the body that is scissoring.
Trackers learn to literally think like an animal as they seek to decipher what it was doing at a particular moment. Under an old white pine, Yacobellis found a fresh deer bed and lay down on it. “Here you can see the imprints of the deer’s front legs,” he said, “because we know a deer lies down by folding its front legs first.
“It’s a beautiful experience. You can sit there and actually visualize what is making these marks in the ground and recreate what happened there. This desire to read the animal’s story is spellbinding, and deepens our connection with the natural world.”
Trackers call the Taghkanic Forest a pinchpoint, a place that funnels wildlife through a relatively narrow corridor. Such pinchpoints are the most precious parts of our environment, conservationists say. The area around Stissing Mountain is a pinchpoint, as is land protected by the Columbia and Dutchess Land Conservancies, the Nature Conservancy, and others. Together these protected areas form a contiguous wildlife corridor that stretches from Canada through the Green Mountains, the Berkshires and the Hudson Valley, facilitating the movement, migration, and genetic diversity of wildlife. Coordinating stewardship of this wildlife corridor is the Follow the Forest partnership.
“Tracking in upstate New York is no cakewalk,” said Yacobellis. “Much of the Northeast is mountainous terrain covered by dense forest over fairly shallow bedrock. One has to either wait for a blanket of snow, or slow down and look carefully at the textured landscape to find signs of animals. The more you get in the dirt, the better you get at tracking.”
Peter Klebnikov / The New Pine Plains Herald
Yacobellis grew up in the shadow of Kennedy airport in Queens, a suburban kid with zero interest in nature. He came to tracking because of one particularly gnarly traffic jam. Returning from an idyllic camping trip in the Catskills with friends, he got stuck in an epic traffic jam on the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge. “I had a panic attack. And I said to myself ‘I can’t live like this anymore.’”
Eventually, he moved to Columbia County and took a wilderness skills training class. “I was instantly hooked,” he said. He immersed himself in books and seminars and spent days in the field. In 2006, with a group of friends, Yacobellis founded Tamakoce Wilderness Programs, one of several local groups mentoring children and adults in nature.
Ever since, he has been teaching tracking to schoolchildren and adults. He believes it’s important to awaken children’s passion for nature because “this generation will be the next caretakers of the land. They will be the ones who will notice when species decline, and advocate to protect wilderness.”
According to a 2025 study by Miles Richardson of the University of Derby, in England, human connections to nature have declined by more than 60% since 1800. The study attributes this in part to parents no longer teaching their children to engage with nature.
Yacobellis deploys a few tricks to encourage schoolchildren to connect with nature. For example, he suggests they place their fingers inside animal tracks to create a stronger connection with wildlife.
“One hundred percent of the time once you give a kid permission to engage with the natural world, they put aside their apprehensions and do it,” he said. “That’s a particular delight to me.
“They’ll be walking through the forest and find fresh tracks of a deer and next to it tracks of coyotes. And their curiosity will be fired up and they want to see how the story ends.”
As for my own tracking experience, the red fox I followed took me through every pricklebush in lower Columbia County with a brief detour into Berkshire County and the Green Mountains as well — or so it seemed. But I shall track again. Yacobellis says my obsession is natural. “After all, humans have been using these skills a lot longer than not using them,” he said.
A novice tracker’s most common mistake is to make assumptions. “We need to stay objective and let the information come to us,” said Yacobellis, who claims tracking can impart broader life lessons: “I make mistaken assumptions all the time. Tracking helps me maintain awareness of that.”
Since everything in the forest is connected, a tracking walk invariably leads to detours — examining an old bird’s nest to discover that a mouse has made a storage closet out of it, or identifying which species of woodpecker made which hole in a snag. “See that massive oblong hole?” asked Yacobellis. “That’s made by a pileated woodpecker that’s found carpenter ants. It’s their favorite food. They go a little crazy when they find them.”
Yacobellis claims to always be tracking, even when he’s at a city park. His dream is to someday find wolf tracks. “We are so close to having wolves reinhabit our area,” he said. “We have the landscape. We have the prey, all we need is human acceptance.”
While it takes years to build the skills to be an expert tracker, with basic training and adequate dirt time you can experience the thrill immediately. “Tracking animals is a window into wildlife,” said Yacobellis. “It captures our imagination.”
After the walk, the nature detectives get into their cars, inspired by what they had seen and learned, and humbled by the 10,000 stories of the forest they did not have the privilege of discovering.