Catch a Crayfish, Count the Stars: Follow a Game Trail

Most people walk at an average speed of about 3–4 miles per hour on flat ground. Of course, it’s much slower if you’re bushwhacking through an area of the woods where thick briar patches, steep embankments, and other natural barriers could slow you down or halt your progress altogether. Rather than giving up on your explorations, you can move through wild landscapes more efficiently by following the trails created by animals.

Compared to us humans, it seems that wild animals have only a few basic needs: food, water, shelter, and space to move around. These four basic things allow them to have the nutrition they need to stay healthy, be protected from bad weather and predators, hang out with other members of their species, and find mates.

The amount of space needed depends on the animal. Cottontail rabbits usually don’t need to move very far to find these things. They can survive their entire lives in an area not much bigger than a football field. Other animals have to travel much farther. Some barren-ground caribou herds that live in Arctic tundra environments migrate more than 2,000 miles every year in search of the best food sources, safe places to rear their young, and areas where they can avoid deep snow. That’s like walking from Washington, D.C., all the way to California!

No matter how far animals must travel to survive, what they all have in common is the ability to navigate across the landscape without using unnecessarily large amounts of energy.

Many animals move efficiently through their environment by making and using trails that follow the path of least resistance, or at least provide a way through, under, over, or around obstacles. We call these game trails, and following them can be a good way to get around in the woods when there isn’t a hiking path.

Animals usually cross streams at shallow points, for example, so following their trails is helpful when you need to get to the other side of a creek without getting too wet. If you’re looking for a way to climb up or down a steep hill, work around a mucky swamp, or cut through thick, thorny brush, game trails are likely to show you the easiest route—after all, animals don’t like struggling through difficult terrain much more than you do.

Game trails are also great places to see wildlife. The game trails that are most common and big enough to accommodate a human are typically made by deer, simply because deer live in so many of the same places that we humans do. But in the right areas, game trails are just as likely to be used by elk, moose, bears, foxes, coyotes, raccoons, and even wild turkeys. All of these animals will readily use the same trails, though they’ll exercise plenty of caution to avoid predators or humans that might be encountered along the way.

Fortunately, game trails are usually not too difficult to identify if you use a few tricks.

• Look for game trails where you’d expect to find them. This might sound obvious, but we don’t always realize the power of trusting our own instincts! If you see a narrow gap through a patch of thick trees and think that animals could be drawn to that particular path, you might be right. In fact, animals probably made the gap, or at least widened it with their frequent passings. Once you start moving through these natural-seeming passageways, you might discover that you’re on an animal path that will lead you through other obstacles that might not be so easy to figure out on your own.
• Look for animal tracks through the snow or mud and follow them. Even a single set of deer tracks through the snow in a field might eventually lead to more sets of deer tracks, which will eventually lead to well-worn trails used by many deer as they pass through difficult terrain.
• Look for game trails in the worst places. Animals are most likely to make trails in the places where trails would be most helpful. There’s little need for raccoons to follow a trail along the open shoreline of a lake, where they can pretty much walk wherever they want. But when that shoreline turns into a cattail marsh, the raccoons will follow narrow paths to allow them to get through quickly and easily.
• In dry, rocky areas, game trails can be harder to follow, but look for areas on the ground where the loose rocks have been pushed aside to expose a line of travel in the underlying dirt.
• If you lose a game trail that you’re trying to follow, make sure to look out ahead of yourself as you try to get back on track. Staring straight down at the ground around your feet will cause you to miss important clues. Instead, you need to see the landscape from the perspective of an animal that’s traveling through it. By looking ahead and choosing the path of least resistance, you’re likely to end up right back on the game trail.

When you’re following a game trail, make sure to ask yourself a few questions. What kinds of obstacles do the animals go straight through? What obstacles do they go around, and why? On steep hills, do game trails go straight up and down, or do they cut across the slope at easier angles?

You can learn a lot about how to move more efficiently in the outdoors by considering how animals do it. But remember that sometimes game trails change directions for reasons known only to the animals that use them. In other cases, game trails will split up into smaller trails or else join a network of other large trails that go in all sorts of different directions. You might also come across a game trail only to find that it simply fades away altogether. These are the mysteries of game trails. The only way to solve the mysteries is to follow them.

Excerpted from CATCH A CRAYFISH, COUNT THE STARS: Fun Projects, Skills, and Adventures for Outdoor Kids. Copyright © 2025 by MeatEater, Inc. Excerpted by permission of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.