For nearly two decades, I’ve devoted my life to the art and science of wildlife tracking and nature awareness.
As a certified Level 3 Track & Sign Cybertracker and graduate of Wilderness Awareness School‘s immersion and apprenticeship program, my mission is to help reactivate your original wild genius, enabling you to experience the joy & connection of solving nature’s mysteries.
It starts with gaining foundational knowledge about birds, plants, trees & animals in your local environment.
But it’s not just about learning facts. It’s about transforming how you perceive and interact with the natural world around you.
My Journey Into The Wilderness…
My own path to this understanding wasn’t a straight line.
I grew up in a very outdoorsy family (hiking, camping, etc), but for most of my childhood, I never really learned how to look and listen to nature.
Sure, I knew a few basics like how to identify robins, chickadees & dandelions… but my overall presence & awareness when I stepped outside was extremely limited.
As I got older, this general lack of focus and basic observation skills also affected my school work and personal relationships. I often felt ‘up in my head, with a vague sense that I wasn’t reaching my full potential in life.
But I had no idea what was missing.
Then one summer at age 15, I went hiking with my family along a river in Ontario.
As usual I was up in my head trying to figure out why my life always felt like such a struggle when I suddenly became aware of my surroundings in a way I had never experienced before.
I started noticing all the amazing colors and textures of the forest, the sounds of rushing water & bird song, the rich scent of clean forest air entering my lungs, and just how good it felt to be in that natural environment.
It was like being pulled into my senses by the beauty and mystery of nature.
But it wasn’t just that I felt tuned in. I also found myself feeling exhilarated and clear in my head like I had never felt before.
My mind became quiet and I was able to see my life from a new perspective that brought renewed hope & inspiration. I was in a flow state and it was very clear that the sensory stimulation of nature had played a key role in this sudden shift in awareness.
I started looking back on all my years spent in nature without ever truly looking or listening in a quality way.
It made me wonder, “What have I been missing all these years?” and “Why did nobody ever show me how to relate more intentionally with nature?”
The Quest To Know Nature Deeply
That hike set me on a new path.
I wanted to know more about how and why nature had this profound beneficial effect on me, but even more importantly, I wanted to go deeper.
So I started reading and seeking information on anything I could find about the relationship between nature, sensory awareness & human psychology.
My research led me to explore everything from ecopsychology to human evolution, anthropology, psychology and spirituality.
But then I stumbled across three books by Tom Brown Jr. – The Tracker, The Way of The Scout, and his Field Guide To Nature Observation & Tracking.
Here, finally, I found someone talking about nature awareness not just as a passive experience, but as a fundamentally human sensory skill that could be nurtured and improved with practice.
Soon after that I also encountered Tom’s first student, who he had mentored in tracking from a young age, Jon Young.
Jon was able to articulate the mentoring process in terms of our human evolution as hunter-gatherers through carefully facilitated dialogue.
He explained how throughout human evolution, every young person was once taught how to track and understand nature at a very deep level.
But it wasn’t through formal schools, it was through an informal oral tradition of artful storytelling & questioning, which he called the invisible school.
I wanted to experience personal mentoring in this ancient tracking awareness for myself, so I set off to Wilderness Awareness School.
Forging Expertise: Mentorship, Practice & Certification
Jon Young and my other mentors at Wilderness Awareness School fundamentally taught me how to ask the good questions about nature and the living things in it, building that inquiry into an intuition, an instinct I could then apply to anything I wanted to study in the natural world.
My years of deep immersion in nature, learning from mentors, testing my skills with certifications like cybertracker, and most importantly, thousands of hours of dedicated personal practice tracking and studying wild animals from owls, to bobcats, raccoons, and backyard robins, have given me the practical, field-tested knowledge I share.
This is the experience that informs my in-depth articles, videos and courses on animal tracking, bird behavior, and understanding nature.
What You Will Gain:
My goal is to translate this real-world expertise into skills you can use to:
- Gain deep knowledge of local plants, trees & local ecosystems.
- Reliably identify animal tracks & sign to understand their stories.
- Learn bird language to locate wildlife and experience a richer awareness outdoors.
- Ultimately, reactivate your own ‘wild genius’ and connect with nature on a profound level.
Let’s Connect & Learn Together: Start Your Journey to Deeper Nature Awareness
There’s no replacement for real experience, but the right guidance can dramatically accelerate your learning. My articles and online courses are designed to give you that fresh, insightful aliveness that only comes from genuine, lived experience in the field.
A great place for beginners to start is my free training video: How To Read The Secrets of A Forest.
To dive into the fascinating world of finding wildlife through sound, check out the Bird Language Adventure Series.
Explore my articles for practical tips and insights on tracking, bird language, and understanding nature and local wildlife.
well
my name is simon tobias
i managed to come over an old mystery like you did :
why do animals fear me as a human ? even if i mean NO harm honestly
i am still working on it but iam very close since in my home birds recognize me
and have no fear around me … but for them its new that humans want to commune with them ( i also start to communicate with the birds )
but yes they sit on the road at my feet and i can walk by …my communication to them is like broken english .. so they got scared sometimes on intuition because i do not fully understand them
pls contact me
the best experience i had was a 12cm butterfly landing on my hand ..
or saving an ice bird from death (ants got him ) becoming friendly to me
i really want to know why they are scared of us and how to fix it. Because i love them as well i do hardly trying to learn their language by experience . and be a friend
i know that we can be friends again so … why they dont know anymore that if we are around a cat might NOT bother them .. ?? why they are scared of humans
Around where i live birds know me and i know them , they are more intelligent then most ppl think but they can remember you . And directly around my house they are not scared but if i try to communicate they get confused . but they let me come Very close ….
Hi Simon, as you point out there’s a lot that can be done to build trust with birds & animals, and I absolutely encourage you to keep working on it.
It does take time and lots of practice.
The best results come from committing yourself to a long term practice of cultivating awareness & sensitivity to nature, body language, bird alarm calls, observation skills, etc.
These are all topics I discuss a lot in this website so definitely peruse my free content and apply the methods.
Always remember that having close encounters with wildlife is a life-changing experience partly because it’s so rare.
It says a lot about a person who can use bird alarms to track down and get close to wild animals. You have to be VERY tuned & sensitive to the subtleties of animal communication to get consistently great results.
There are specific changes in mindset & attitude that need to happen before you can reach your full potential.
The other thing to remember is that these are wild animals living in a survival situation! You won’t be able to domesticate them in a single lifetime, and you shouldn’t try!
Just let them be wild, and cherish the moments when you get to join them in that wildness. They will remind you what true wildness is!
Imagine if the situation were reversed… How safe would you feel being close to a tiger out in some remote jungle?
Their fear of humans is logical 😉
Their fear is feedback for you. It tells you you’re violating their comfort zone. Just pull back, take it slow, and let them set the pace.
I hope that helps!
Hi Brian
I came to your site because this morning I found a raccoon under our farm truck. I knew there was something living in the yard because the dogs were alarming in the same direction every day at about the same time. We have an old abandoned farm house up on a small rise here and we’ve left it standing for porcupines and raccoons and foxes that will den under it. Anyway, I was curious what raccoons eat in winter which led me here. So then I started reading about who you are and what you do. I feel the same way you do when I walk through the bush here in Saskatchewan. My favourite thing to do is find a quiet spot and sit and listen and watch. Especially in the spring and summer. You can tell who has come back from the south by listening to the birds. I’ve seen all sorts of things by listening to alarm calls from birds or from going out to visit my goats in the pasture and just sitting with them. Nature is a balm for me and any day I can’t be outside is a bad dayfor me. Lol. Thank you for taking the time to write about raccoon feeding habits. I learned something today. I’m off to escort our raccoon friend out from the truck so I can go check cows.