When I left South Africa last year after my first game-ranger expedition with Woodland Ways, I believed I had a slight grasp of tracking. I’d completed the Cybertracker Track & Sign at a Level 1 which felt like a milestone and upon my return home, I wrote a blog post of “what is tracking?” and how discovering tracks and signs reshaped how I viewed animal encounters. This year returning was interesting, I'd studied a little before jumping on the plane, but there's only so much study you can do out of country, while I aimed for a higher grade, I was apprehensive of how being out of physical practice for 12 months would manifest.
This year I returned. Same country, same place, many of the same guides. But I carried a new mindset, the landscape was familiar, but I was not. And that’s what I feel returning really teaches: return isn’t repetition. Return is transformation.
The call of the Red Chested Cuckoo and the early morning mist drifted over the mountain as the group roused ready for an early morning bush walk, the bush was as harsh and beautiful as ever. I was ready to continue learning. Except this time, I wasn’t completely new to some of the tracks and signs. Instead of them being marks showing movement, the tracks started to seem more like stories.
Last year I would look at a print in the sand and think, something walked here. This year I found myself noticing the angle of a track, the direction of pressure, the change in gait, and without even trying I’d start piecing together what might have happened in the hours or days before we arrived. It wasn’t that I suddenly understood everything, but I could feel that my eye had changed.
Being back in that environment for a second time makes you more observant without you realising it. You begin to notice the smallest details: the faint drag of a hoof, the subtle shift in substrate, the way grass bends differently when something heavier has come through. You start paying attention to things you would have walked straight past a year ago.
And with that observancy comes something else: a sense of belonging. Not in a romantic “I’m one with nature” kind of way, but in a grounded, practical way. Knowing the alarm calls a little better, recognising certain trees, being familiar with the rhythm of the mornings and evenings… it all builds a feeling that you’re no longer just a visitor looking in from the outside. You’re part of the environment’s daily conversation, even if only as a very quiet observer.
I didn’t step off the plane this year feeling confident, and I still wouldn’t say I fully understand the bush. But I did feel less like an outsider. Familiarity changes the way you move, the way you look, the way you process information. The land doesn’t feel smaller, but its mysteries feel less overwhelming. You know enough to follow the stories, even if you can’t yet read every word. Like seeing elephant foot tracks, and a drag in the sand, You can read some words (the footprints) but not quite others (the drag in the sand) it gave great story telling wonder, "maybe it's a trunk mark, it possibly looks like a young elephant by the size of the tracks, maybe its an elephants trunk curious on the substrate change?"
Walking those same paths again, I found myself slowing down more, listening more, observing more, the bird calls, the light, it all seemed sharper. And I think that’s the biggest gift of returning: it doesn’t make the bush easier, it makes you more present. More switched on. More aware that every mark, every sound, every shift in the landscape is part of a bigger picture you’re slowly learning to interpret.
You don’t come back understanding everything. But you do come back understanding more of yourself as a tracker.
As the days went on, I realised just how much difference a year makes. Not just in knowledge, but in the way you pay attention. Last year I spent a lot of time trying to memorise shapes: which species left which print, what a track should look like in good substrate. This year the focus shifted. I wasn’t just looking for clean, textbook spoor. I was looking for behaviour. Movement. Intention. Clues like while on the trail of buffalo, seeing a flock of Ox Peckers far ahead gives a good indication of big game, and that potentially being the buffalo we were tracking. And that shift changed everything.
Sometimes it was subtle: noticing a more substrate moved on a print that hinted at a faster step, catching a faint swipe of a lizard tail across the surface of the sand, or understanding symbiotic relationships between different species. Other times it was more obvious, like finding Leopard tracks overlaying impala tracks and realising the order of events without overthinking it. These weren’t things I could have forced myself to see last year. It wasn’t about confidence, it was about time, exposure, and allowing the environment to teach you at its own pace.
That’s the thing about tracking: the more you try to force understanding, the less you actually see. Returning taught me to start to see what is there and not what I think I see.
It also meant that when evaluation time came around, I wasn’t approaching it with the same mindset as before. Last year I was nervous, worried about being wrong, trying to cling to every bit of information I could see, often over analysing the track, crossing out my first answer for something else only to find out that I was right the first time. Sometimes your own mind is your worst enemy. This year I approached it with a quieter mind. Not calmer, exactly, just more aware to go with my gut, and that it would show me what I needed to know if I slowed down enough to listen. I would avoid lingering on tracks and overthinking what it could be, instead just looking without trying to see!
Passing Track & Sign Level 3 with 94% was surreal for me, someone with little to no experience other than 2 weeks, 12 months previous. It wasn’t a triumphant moment, not a loud feeling at all. It was more like a breath out. A realisation that the effort I’d put in during the time on the continent and previous reading, the small bits of tracking I'd done in my spare time in the UK, the mental notes, the mistakes, had actually done something. Like both Colin and Samantha Patrick say “you win some or you learn some”, and now, I was also in the mind set that failure was a good learning opportunity, Last year I dropped some big exam points on easy questions, and although I was a bit disappointed at the time, I’ve never forgotten the track since.
But the score wasn’t the part that mattered most. What mattered was the shift I felt. I noticed more. I questioned myself less. I corrected myself faster. I felt far more connected to the environment than I had a year before. Not comfortable - never comfortable - but familiar enough to understand how little I still know, and how much more there is to learn.
That’s the humility the bush gives you. It rewards effort, but it also keeps you grounded. Just when you think you’ve got a handle on something, it throws you a track you’ve never seen before, in substrate you don’t like, with angles that contradict your expectations. And instead of panicking, this year I found myself thinking, Okay… what can & can’t I see here?
That shift from wanting to be right, to wanting to understand is what made all the difference.
Returning to South Africa didn’t close the book on tracking for me. It opened it wider.