After a purposeful dash-and-pause through the undergrowth, dodging whipping branches and pausing to identify animal scat and trees marked by tooth and claw, the Wisniewskis lead the way back onto man-made paths.
Nick and Valerie Wisniewski are animal trackers, and while they can show great enthusiasm at the discovery of porcupine quills in coyote poop, they don’t disdain the human signs in what Nick refers to as the Quabbin Reservoir’s “accidental wilderness.” The road takes us to the Keystone Bridge, a sturdy arch of balanced stone over the middle branch of the Swift River. The river is strong with rain and snowmelt, and Nick points out what the river has drowned out.
“It’s just an incredible, beautiful place with a real healing kind of feel to it. You sit here and the sound of the water has now blocked out the sound of all the automobiles that are not too far from here, and you can just lose yourself,” he says.
The Wisniewskis don’t advocate losing yourself in the woods in the literal sense, but they don’t think fear or unfamiliarity should keep people from the outdoors.
“We started, too, because we wanted to share what our experience was and make it accessible and not magical, you know? some people think ‘Oh if you’re not a Native American or a Kalahari bushman you can’t do it,’” Valerie says. To be fair to the myth, she comes from a Cherokee family, but that’s not why she can teach tracking.
Growing up in Arkansas with her forestry consultant father, Valerie was introduced early and often to the woods and wildlife.
“He’d bring baby turtles and lizards and snakes and things, and we’d turn them into pets. Armadillos, I had an armadillo for a pet,” she says. “I was so, so comfortable in the woods because it was my backyard, but also being out with my dad; it was a natural place to be.”
After moving east, she learned to track under the tutelage of Paul Rezendes. Nick and Valerie met in the late 1990s as fellow tracking apprentices, and they took over the business when Rezendes retired. They’re the only couple they know of in the usually male-dominated tracking business, and they’ve been leading nature programs now as Walnut Hill Tracking and Nature Center for 12 or 13 years. A lot of that time is spent in the Quabbin woods but with expeditions farther afield and specialist teachers in areas such as human tracking and wetlands.
As they see it, the Quabbin woods are a regional jewel — 81,000 acres protected from most human interference since the creation of the reservoir for thirsty Boston — but it’s also a matter of knowing what’s in their backyard.
Raised in Belchertown, Nick says he grew up a “nature nerd,” with a mushroom-collecting dad and early influence from nationally-known Quabbin nature photographer Les Campbell, who helped with his high school photography club.
“I never felt like being outside was discouraged,” he says. Tracking provided the perfect umbrella for his interests. “It gave a title to what I was doing. Instead of wandering around in the woods I was ‘tracking,”’ he says.
Both view tracking as an end in itself, a lens through which to see and find your place in nature, rather than a practical pursuit in the carnivorous sense. When they set out on an animal’s trail they aren’t hunting it, although Nick adds that Valerie is a crack shot.
Also an interpreter at Walden Pond and well-versed in Henry David Thoreau’s thinking, Nick says the idea that nature’s value is only in its direct benefit to humans is long outmoded.
“We can’t exist without nature. We evolved with nature, and unfortunately we sometimes forget that is really the basis of all human life,” Nick says. With 7 billion people on the planet and counting, the Wisniewskis are very concerned about sustainability.
“It really becomes obvious that can’t be sustained indefinitely, and the more that happens the more people get disconnected from nature, and becoming disconnected from nature you actually become disconnected from your own essence and you become disconnected from other people as well,” Nick says. Fewer kids are growing up climbing trees, falling out of trees and generally learning to be comfortable outdoors, they think, and the disconnect isn’t helping their health or well being, or the planet’s.
Nick says they believe that there’s something spiritual, for lack of a better word, to be found in nature.
“If we can reconnect with that then we’re really reconnecting with very deep, important facets of our own being, and its our hope that if people rediscover that connection they can really kind of alter the course of human history; all the crazy stuff that goes on in the world when we don’t think anything we do has an impact,” he says.
But enough philosophy, where’s the feces?
Everywhere. The Wisniewskis have selected a well-traveled animal trail, and overgrown stumps are prominently appointed with scat. Messages, they say, left by different species in conspicuous locations. From the dimensions and characteristically canid spiral, they identify two neighboring examples as coyote and fox. Farther along, they stop in a small clearing with a mound of scat. Prodding at one example, they discover that a coyote has eaten some porcupine – quills and all – and managed to relieve itself of the sharp spines. Valerie can hardly contain herself at this uncommon find. Soft fur in other examples suggests snowshoe hare, and dark black indicates organ meat. At this point in one of their day-long classes they would break out the dental picks and latex gloves and really delve in, looking for clues to who has been there, what they’re eating, how they’re living. They lead most of their group programs in winter, when tracks are plain to see in the snow, but sign – as distinct from tracks – is everywhere in the spring. Trees are scraped by deer antlers, young branches sheared off by porcupines, and melted snow reveals a mole’s tunnel as a narrow trench across a dirt road.
They point next to a tall red pine. A pine tree with red-brown bark and green needles and whatnot. Tree stuff.
The art of being in the woods is like any other art, Nick says later; it’s about developing your powers of observation. Forget your car payment and what’s for dinner and you start to see things.
Even with the Wisniewskis pointing to them it takes a moment for the cross-hatching of claw and tooth marks to stand out from the craggy bark of the red pine. Bears like to bite and claw this kind of tree to leave messages, Valerie says.
It’s not feeding behavior, nor territoriality nor aggression, Nick says, it’s some kind of communication, and with generations of bear returning to the same trees the messages must be worth passing on. He points to a smaller white pine, with an old, deep wound. They don’t want people to fear animals that will mostly leave them alone, but don’t see any reason not to be humbled by signs of an animal that can take a bite out of a tree.
Some of the things they teach are best learned directly, they say, like which of the many red berries out there are safe to eat and which are noxious or poisonous. Their classes can also get very in-depth, with students who apprentice and stay with them for years. Other things – like a general comfort in nature – can be picked up alone, but don’t have to be.
“I would have puzzled a lot of it out for myself, but it’s helpful to have a teacher, and I think more people are afraid to go into the woods by themselves, so we act as a guide in and out,” Valerie says.
Most full day programs cost $50. A half-day program better suited to the tolerances of families with children costs $25. The business is based in Orange, at 325 Walnut Hill Road and online at www.walnuthilltracking.com.