12. The Art of Tracking & Wild Bison — with Toni Romani

“If you train your brain, it's easy to find tracks. Tracks are everywhere. You can see tracks in the city. You can see tracks in your house.”

- Toni Romani

SYNOPSIS:

This episode weaves live narrative, interview and descriptions on Romanian bison, wild forest adventures, and the lost ancient art and science of tracking.

Tracking is an ancient sensorial and survival strategy that our nomadic ancestors cultivated as state of profound observation. It led to the development of many innate abilities of the human mind and indeed, tracking is so ingrained in our very cells that it is synonymous with being human. 

There is a movement today to revitalise tracking into a new modern profession, into a science that can help to monitor the impact of climate change and biodiversity loss and nature conservation. More on this in the show… 

Here I bring you into my own story of tracking animals and wild bison in the mountains of Romania with We Wilder, a social enterprise and cooperative founded by WWF Romania and local community members. We were engaging in a 4 day experience led by Toni Romani, a certified Cyber Tracker facilitator, and organised as part of building a local circular economy and connecting more people to the practicalities and experience of rewilding.

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GUEST BIO:

Toni Romani is a wildlife biologist and primatologist from Italy with extensive experience studying large European carnivores and their relationship to their prey, as well as chimpanzee nesting behaviour, using indirect evidence and non-invasive approaches (tracking, trailing and camera trapping).

Toni has developed over the years an innovative approach to studying wildlife and interpreting the landscape through the interpretation of tracks and signs based on the CyberTracker standard, collaborating with local communities, organizations and NGOs in Europe and eastern Africa.

He is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Warsaw, Poland, and teaches a Primatology master’s program at the University of Girona, Spain entitled ‘Tools and methods of research in primatology‘, which incorporates a combination of CyberTracker and SMART technology.

QUOTES:

• Culture is what you learn socially. That answers the the basic question of how do we live here in this place?

• Tracking is beautiful to participate in because it's profound mindfulness. It's a lot of awareness, it's a lot of humility, it's a lot of play.

• Reviving something that is being lost, and enabling a whole new series of livelihoods, is a very dignified way of being.

• You need to build a memory. You need to build a map in your brain.

• It doesn't matter if you've never been in nature. I think I saw the most beautiful ideas with kids or with people who have never been ‘in’ nature.

• If you train your brain, it's easy to find tracks. Tracks are everywhere. You can see tracks in the city. You can see tracks in your house.

• I have to walk in their tracks, literally — walk, just feeling with my feet, feeling the tracks under my under my shoes. It helps me to feel the animal, their speed, how they move.

• Then you start putting information one after the other. It's just like reading a book, like having one word after another, and you start creating sentences.

SHOW LINKS

• How the return of the Bison will transform Europe (by Mossy Earth)

• Cyber Tracker 

• The Art of Tracking resources

• We Wilder Romania 

• Toni Romani: Research Gate & CyberTracker Italy

• Movebank technology approach to animal tracking (Max Planck institute)

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