Wild Tracks!

Have you ever been out for a walk in the woods and seen a set of animals tracks? Did you ever wonder what kind of creature might have made them? Well, if you happened to be carrying this book you might very well be able to identify them.

Wild Tracks, a non-fiction picture book written and illustrated by Jim Arnosky is an interesting and very informative book all about the various animal tracks you might stumble upon outside in the U.S. This handy little guide is filled with life-size drawings of all sorts of woodland creatures prints, so if you did happen to have this book with you, you could compare the tracks side by side. How cool is that?

For this book, Arnosky broke up his informational text into seven different types of tracks: deer, other hooved animals, bears, small animals, reptiles and birds, felines, and canines. For each section he includes a brief overview of the track family as well as labeled pencil drawings of the various animal prints. He also includes examples of tracks for animals running and walking with the average distances between each print.

The illustrations for this book are vibrant and colorful, which definitely lend a lot of spirit to the overall product. To really tie them into the concept of the book, Arnosky made sure that each animal in the painting also had their tracks displayed as you might see them in the wild.

Overall, I think students, especially upper elementary and above, would really enjoy this book and learn a lot from it, particularly with the life-size drawings. This is definitely a book you could use at your own home to figure out which little creature has been scampering across your flowers at night! You could even expand on this concept by having students make their own human tracks out of clay and displaying them around the room.