Recognising Tracks and Signs of British Mammals

Reading the Ground

Most of our mammals are shy, nocturnal or both, and a walk that turns up nothing but a few pigeons can still be hiding a busy night shift. The trick is to stop looking for animals and start looking for what they leave behind. Mud, silt, soft snow, damp sand and the first frosts all hold a record of the night's traffic, and you don't need much kit beyond a torch, a notebook and a ruler.

The best conditions come after rain, when every hoof and pad presses cleanly into the soil, or in a hard frost, when prints stay crisp for hours. Get out early, before sun and wind blur the detail, and walk slowly along the edges of fields, hedgerows and riverbanks. Footpaths, gateways, log piles and muddy hollows under trees are the motorway junctions of the countryside — concentrate your attention there.

Footprints: Getting Your Eye In

Count the toes first; that single detail eliminates most of the field.

• Badger: five toes, a broad, kidney-shaped pad and long, obvious claw marks. Front prints can reach 8cm across and usually fall in a line, one almost directly in front of the other.
• Fox: four toes set in a narrow, elegant print, with a pad showing three distinct lobes at the front. Claws show, and the tracks often run in a neat, determined straight line.
• Dog: four toes, but wider and rounder, usually splayed, and messier in its route.
• Deer: two toes forming a heart or kite shape. Red deer slots run to 9cm long, fallow around 6–7cm, roe 4–5cm and the little muntjac down at 3cm. On soft ground the dewclaws print behind, which can be useful when separating the larger species.
• Otter: five toes and a broad, webbed pad, often 8cm or more, with a distinctive width where the webbing spreads.
• Cat: four toes, a rounded pad, and no claw marks at all — cats sheathe theirs when walking.
• Rabbit and hare: hind feet land ahead of the front feet, giving a T-shaped pattern. Rabbit pads look furred and indistinct; brown hare prints are longer and more splayed.

Measure a print and record the stride length too. A walking badger steps around 30–40cm; a trotting fox covers the ground in a longer, more even rhythm.

Droppings and Scent Marks

Droppings are the fastest way to confirm a species, and they are far less grubby to examine than you might fear.

• Otter: spraint is dark, tarry and full of fish bones and scales, often left on a prominent stone or grass tussock at the water's edge. Fresh spraint has a sweet, hay-like or jasmine-tea smell — nothing like the fishiness you would expect.
• Badger: deposited in a shallow scrape, usually in a latrine near a sett or a territorial boundary. Dark and slimy, often holding seeds, insect cases and fruit stones, with a musky whiff.
• Fox: twisted, with pointed ends, frequently left on a path, stone or mound, and usually containing fur, bone fragments and berry pips.
• Deer: shiny dark pellets when fresh, each with a small point or dimple at one end. Roe deer pellets are small and neat; fallow droppings clump together more loosely.
• Hedgehog: dark, glossy, cylindrical droppings, often left on a lawn and glittering with beetle wing cases.

Feeding Remains

What an animal leaves on its plate is often more telling than what it leaves on the ground.

Look at nibbled hazelnuts. A grey squirrel splits the shell into two clean halves or bites a neat hole with a smooth edge. A wood mouse leaves a small round hole ringed with fine tooth scratches. Bank voles gnaw a larger, ragged hole with clear tooth marks around the rim, while a dormouse leaves a beautifully smooth, round hole with no external scoring at all — a genuine thrill to find.

Badgers leave snuffle holes: small, conical patches of turf turned over while hunting worms and leatherjackets, sometimes in their dozens across a field. They will also dig out wasp and bumblebee nests, leaving shredded comb nearby. Foxes cache food and leave middens of feathers, fur and bone. Along rivers, look for the heads and tails of eels or the picked-clean remains of fish, and for otter slides — smooth, muddy chutes down a bank into the water.

Deer leave a browsing line where hedges have been grazed to a uniform height, and bucks fray bark from saplings by rubbing their antlers in late spring and summer.

Setts, Paths and Runs

Homes give the game away. A badger sett is a series of large, oval entrances, roughly 25–30cm wide, each with a fan of freshly dug spoil outside and well-worn paths radiating between them. Bedding — dry grass, bracken or leaves — is often dragged just inside the entrance.

Fox earths are usually smaller and rougher, with bones and scat nearby. Rabbit burrows are smaller still, and rabbit grazing keeps the surrounding vegetation cropped short. Water vole burrows in a riverbank sit above the waterline and are often surrounded by grazed lawns and neat piles of clipped stems.

Look out for badger highways: broad, smooth, well-trodden paths that run from sett to field and are used night after night. Deer paths are narrower, more irregular, and frequently pass beneath low branches. Otter runs hug the water's edge and often end in a slide.

A Habit Worth Keeping

Keep a small notebook and jot down date, location, substrate, weather and measurements. Photograph what you find with a coin or ruler alongside for scale. Within a season you will begin to recognise a particular badger's route, a fox's regular calling card and the exact stone an otter favours for its spraint.

Two courtesies matter. Never disturb a sett, holt or burrow, and keep your distance from anything occupied — badgers, otters and their resting places are protected by law. Take nothing but a photograph and a measurement, and leave the story on the ground for the next visitor to read.