Why mud remembers everything

After rain, a woodland path becomes a ledger. Every creature that crossed it overnight has signed its name — a splayed hoof print, a scatter of nibbled nutshells, a hollow scraped in the leaf litter. Learning to read those marks turns a familiar walk into a slow, absorbing conversation with the animals around you, and that quiet attention is exactly what forest bathing is all about.

You do not need specialist kit. A notebook, a tape measure or a credit card for scale, and a willingness to crouch down will do. What helps most is returning to the same stretch of wood again and again, so that mud, weather and season teach you the patterns.

Footprints: start with the basics

Look first at the shape of the pad, then count the toes, then ask whether claws show. As a rule of thumb, dogs and foxes leave claw marks because their claws are not fully retractable; cats usually do not.

• Badger: a broad, kidney-shaped pad with five toes and deep, blunt claw marks sitting well in front of the toes — like a bear cub's print, about 6–8 cm wide.
• Fox: narrower and more oval, four toes, a neat triangular pad, claws usually visible. A straight-line walk with prints almost in single file is classic fox.
• Deer: two hooves pressed together, forming a heart-shaped slot. Roe deer prints are small (around 3–4 cm), fallow larger and slightly splayed, muntjac small and neat with frequent little prints behind. On soft ground the dewclaws — two dots behind the hoof — may show.
• Grey squirrel: small, with four toes on the front foot and five on the hind. The giveaway is the gait: the long hind feet land ahead of the front ones, giving a hopping, paired pattern.
• Rabbit and hare: similar but scaled differently — a hare's hind print is much longer, and it walks with a wider stance. Rabbit prints sit in clusters near burrow entrances.
• Wood mouse and vole: tiny, almost bird-like, but the tail often drags as a fine line between the prints.

Otter prints are the prize by a stream: five toes, a wide, rounded pad, often with a heavy tail drag through the mud beside it.

Droppings and pellets: the tracker's shorthand

Unpleasant to contemplate, wonderfully informative in practice. Colour, shape and placement tell you almost as much as a footprint.

• Deer: dark, glossy, oval pellets with a slight point at one end, often dropped in loose piles on grass or along a path.
• Badger: deposited in shallow scraped pits — latrines — used repeatedly. Soft, dark and often containing fruit stones or insect remains in autumn.
• Fox: twisted and tapering at the ends, frequently left on something raised — a stone, a tussock, a tree stump — as a scent mark.
• Otter: spraint, often on a flat rock by water. Dark, crumbly and full of fish bones and scales, with a distinctly fishy, not unpleasant, smell.
• Tawny owl: not droppings but pellets, grey and rounded, coughed up beneath a roost tree. Soak one apart and you will find fur and tiny bones — usually vole.

Feathers, fur and feeding signs

A scatter of feathers on the ground is a small crime scene. Check the base of the quill: chewed, ragged ends suggest a mammal has bitten them off, while neatly plucked feathers with clean shafts point to a bird of prey.

Feeding signs are even more generous, because they stay put. Nutshells are a whole field guide on their own. A round hole with neat, parallel toothmarks around the rim is the work of a wood mouse; a hazelnut with a rough, irregular opening and the shell split into pieces is more likely a grey squirrel. Nuthatches wedge nuts into bark crevices and hammer them open, leaving broken shells beneath the tree.

Look at twigs, too. Deer and rabbits both nibble, but in different ways: deer tear at shoots with no lower front teeth, so the end of the twig looks frayed and ragged, while rabbits cut through cleanly at a sharp angle with a single bite. A browse line — a neat hedge of nibbled shoots at a constant height — tells you where deer have been feeding.

Burrows, holes and hidden homes

Mud keeps the front door as well as the footprints. A large, oval hole in a bank, with fresh soil spilling out and well-worn paths radiating away, is a badger sett — often ancient and used by generations. Rabbit warrens are smaller, more numerous and usually linked by cropped grass and scattered droppings.

Fox earths are messier: often a single, wide entrance in a bank or beneath tree roots, with prey remains and a distinctive, musky scent nearby. Along streams, look for the golf-ball-sized holes of water voles low in the bank, usually beside a close-cropped lawn of nibbled grass and small piles of droppings. Hedgehog hibernation nests are domes of leaves tucked into a hedge bottom, easy to disturb and best left alone.

Slowing down: tracking as forest bathing

The value of tracking is not a list of identifications. It is the slowing down. Crouching over a patch of mud, noticing the light on a wet hoofprint, listening for the rustle that made the mark — this is the same deliberate, sensory attention that forest bathing cultivates.

Try one practice this autumn: choose a small stretch of path, no more than twenty metres, and visit it every fortnight. Note what changes in the mud after rain, which prints appear in the snow or frost, which latrines are refreshed. You will begin to notice residents rather than visitors — the badger that patrols nightly, the roe deer family that crosses at dawn, the fox that marks the same stump.

Go quietly, keep dogs on a short lead near setts and burrows, and take nothing but notes. The woodland will carry on writing; your job is simply to learn the handwriting.