Why Autumn Tells the Clearest Story

By late September the woodland has stopped growing and started recording. Wet ground holds an impression beautifully, fallen leaves frame every run and scrape, and the year's mast crop pulls animals onto predictable routes. If you want to learn what lives in a wood, this is the fortnight to do it.

Walk slowly, keep your eyes on the ground two or three metres ahead, and stop often. Most tracks are found within ten paces of a gateway, a fallen tree or a stream crossing, because that is where animals are funnelled. Carry a notebook, a tape measure and a coin for scale. Nothing you find will mean much unless you write down where and when.

Footprints in Soft Ground

Mud is your best friend from October onwards. Check the edges of bridleways, the low side of gateways, poached ground under yew and holly, and the soft silt on stream banks.

• Deer slot: two clean cleats with a gap between. Roe prints are small and neat, roughly 4 to 5cm long. Fallow are noticeably broader and splay more on soft ground. Muntjac leave a tiny, almost triangular mark.
• Badger: broad and flat-footed with five toes and long, obvious claw marks ahead of the pads. Look for a line of prints along a worn path rather than a scattered trail.
• Fox: narrower and more oval, four toes, claws usually visible, often on the same paths as badgers but straighter and more purposeful.
• Grey squirrel: a hopping pattern, small front feet landing behind the longer hind feet, usually beneath a favoured feeding stump.
• Otter: five toes on a wide pad, often with webbing showing, close to water and frequently accompanied by a smooth slide mark down a bank.

Measure a print and photograph it with your coin alongside. After a season of doing this you will recognise your local animals without hesitation.

Droppings, Pellets and Latrines

Unpleasant to some, invaluable to the tracker. Freshness matters: dark and glossy means recent, dull and crumbly means days old.

• Deer: oval pellets, usually dimpled at one end, left in loose piles on paths and field edges.
• Badger: dropped in shallow scraped pits, often a series of them along a boundary. Dark, soft and variable, reflecting a mixed diet.
• Fox: twisted and tapering, frequently laced with fur or feather, and typically placed on a tussock or stone as a scent mark.
• Otter: spraint is crumbly and dry, smells faintly of hay or fish, and is left on flat stones at stream bends.
• Tawny owl: grey, felted pellets packed with small bones and skulls, found beneath a regular roost tree.

Nibbled Twigs, Stripped Cones and Chewed Nuts

This is the real skill of autumn tracking, because feeding signs stay put long after the animal has gone. Get into the habit of picking up hazelnuts and checking them.

• Grey squirrel: leaves a scatter of cone scales and a bare core on a stump, and splits hazelnuts with jagged, uneven edges.
• Wood mouse: gnaws a neat round hole and leaves the shell otherwise intact.
• Bank vole: nibbles the shell in a smooth spiral, often still attached to its cup.
• Dormouse: the opening is smooth and circular with tooth marks running around the inner rim, and there are no jagged splinters. A genuine find, so record it.
• Deer browsing: shrubs such as bramble, ivy and honeysuckle show a distinct browse line at chest height, with twigs torn and ragged because deer lack upper front teeth.
• Rabbit and hare: cuts are clean and angled, like a knife stroke, usually close to the ground.

Burrows, Runs and Dreys

Look for earthworks as well as food. A badger sett gives itself away with heaps of fresh spoil outside oval entrances that are wider than they are tall, plus well-polished paths between them and discarded bedding nearby. Rabbit warrens are usually on lighter, sandy soil and come with scrapes, latrines and close-cropped grass.

Squirrel dreys are football-sized bundles of leaves and twigs wedged in a fork, often high and in silhouette. Look too for flattened runs through long grass under hedgerows, and for the tell-tale loose bark and wood chips left by a woodpecker working a dead bough. Never put your hand into a hole; check from a respectful distance and move on.

Foraging and Woodcraft with a Light Touch

Autumn is a generous season, but take the trouble to take properly. Sweet chestnuts, hazelnuts, sloes, crab apples, rosehips and rowan berries all repay a slow walk, and hedgerow fungi such as hedgehog fungus are excellent eating. If you cannot identify something with absolute certainty, leave it alone, and never pick rare species or strip a bush bare.

Mast crops matter enormously to jays, mice, voles, deer and dormice, and those same animals are fattening up for winter. Take a modest share from the middle of an abundant crop, never the last of anything, and leave the fallen nuts beneath the trees for the small mammals that need them.

For woodcraft, working with cut material is both legal and sustainable. Hazel coppice is traditionally cut on rotation in winter, so ask a landowner before taking poles, and take deadwood for kindling only where it is lying loose. Standing deadwood is one of the richest habitats in the wood, so leave it be. Whittle from windfall or prunings, carry a small folding saw and gloves, and always check a bough for resting wildlife before you cut it. Follow the Countryside Code, take your litter and shavings home, and keep fires small and only where they are permitted.

Return to the same wood every few weeks through autumn and the story builds up. A badger print becomes a sett, a sett becomes a route, and a route becomes a good evening spent sitting quietly at a respectful distance, learning a place properly.