Themed collection · For you, family or group

Tracking & Trailing

Footprints, trails, signs and the stories they tell, from your first track to following a trail.

56 Wilding activity guidesAll 56 for £12.00 · coming soon

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🃏 Includes a printable card set: every Wilding activity guide as an A6 card (four to an A4 sheet) to spread out, plan with or use for a lucky dip. See a sample

See the whole collection at once. Plan a programme, pick tonight’s activity, or let the lucky dip choose for you. Tap any card to open its Wilding activity guide.

Sit spot trail

Pheromone trail

Making a footprint plaster cast

Concentric rings

Invisibility

Learning dog language

Setting up a trail camera

Bird footprint detective

Bird footprint matching

Fingertip tracking

Mammal track matching

Tracking birds by sign & sound

Tracking insects

Tracking nature’s connections

Tracking snail trails

Tracking the seasons

Tracking through time & space

Tracking trees

Tracking yourself

CyberTracker

How to make a tracking stick

Track tracer

50 tracks in a row

Flour trailing

Footprint flour trailing

Safety, and where the Wilding activity guides come from

Look after yourself and others. Outdoor activities carry real risks: fire, tools, water, weather, heights, plants, fungi, animals and getting lost. Every Wilding activity guide includes safety notes, but you are responsible for your own safety and for anyone in your care. Supervise children closely, get the landowner's permission, follow the Countryside Code, never eat anything you cannot identify with complete certainty, and only light fires where it is allowed and safe. If in doubt, leave it out.

With gratitude to the lineage. Wilding and its Practice Keys are inspired by the work of Jon Young and colleagues: the core routines of nature connection in the 8 Shields approach, also known as Coyote Mentoring, shared in Coyote's Guide to Connecting with Nature (Young, Haas & McGown). Many of the Wilding activity guides grew from those routines.

These ways of noticing and belonging are far older than any book. They grow from the knowledge of Indigenous and land-based peoples around the world, who have lived in close relationship with the land for thousands of years and have kept that knowledge alive, often in the face of great loss. Jon Young describes 8 Shields as built on patterns of nature connection he found in Indigenous cultures around the world, and on what his mentors taught him, including the teachings passed down through Tom Brown Jr. from Grandfather Stalking Wolf. Our own ancestors in these islands once knew the land in this way too.

I offer Wilding with deep respect and thanks to all of them. It does not claim or copy any culture's ceremonies or sacred practices. It is a UK way of carrying forward simple, shared human ways of paying attention, giving thanks and belonging to a place. — Jay