Caretaking and the Tracker "Skillset"

Caretaking spans the entire range of skills taught by Tom Brown at the Tracker School.  Here is a sampling:

• Tracking skills are necessary to determine what animals are in an area and what trails they use.  This way you will know what animals to encourage and which animals to discourage.  Also which trails to open up  to which animals.  For example, if you know that an area used to support lots of rabbits, and could again, you might want to open up trails specifically for rabbits.

• Nature Class skills are valuable in analyzing trail patterns.

• Philosophy skills are necessary to determine what the land and nature wants you to do to heal or repair damage, or what to refrain from doing.

• Advanced Awareness skills enhance the Philosophy skills.

• Standard class skills help one to better be able to build animal shelters from natural materials.

• Scout skills are applied to hiding the caretaking work that one is doing, so as to not attract attention to an area.  This is especially important if the area needs to remain undisturbed, or if the goal is to reduce the disturbance caused by humans.