Reading the Wood Before You See Anything

Most of the mammals in a British wood are nocturnal, shy, or both. You might walk a favourite path for years and never meet a badger, yet the wood is covered in its handwriting. Tracks and signs let you build a picture of who lives there, how they move and what they have been eating, without ever needing a close sighting.

The best conditions are simple to remember. Damp ground after rain holds impressions beautifully, and mud at gateways, path edges and stream banks is the most readable surface of all. Winter and early spring are the connoisseur's seasons: undergrowth dies back, leaves are down, and last year's feeding debris is still lying about. Take a notebook, a camera, a coin or a boot for scale, and a small tape measure.

Footprints, Runs and Pathways

Learn a handful of prints and you will start seeing them everywhere.

• Badger: broad, flat-footed prints up to 8 cm across, with five toes and a kidney-shaped pad. Long, blunt claw marks usually show ahead of the toes. Look for them in a line along regular runs.
• Deer: cloven "slots", two toes forming a heart shape that is pointed at the front. Roe prints are small, around 3 to 4 cm; fallow and red are considerably larger and may add two small dew-claw marks in soft ground.
• Fox: narrower and more oval than a dog's, roughly 5 cm, with four toes and visible claws, usually placed in a neat, straight line.
• Otter: five toes in a broad, rounded print beside water, often accompanied by a heavy tail drag in mud or sand.
• Grey squirrel: small, roughly 4 cm, four toes in front and five behind, frequently in pairs.

Runs are as telling as prints. Badgers and foxes use narrow, well-worn highways, often worn bare and swept clean of debris, passing under fences through short grass tunnels.

Droppings, Latrines and Scent Marks

Unpleasant as it sounds, droppings are among the most reliable field clues available, and each species has a signature.

• Badger latrine: a shallow scraped pit, often at a territory boundary or on a path, holding dark, sloppy dung with a strong musky smell. Badgers return to the same pits repeatedly.
• Fox scat: twisted and tapering, with pointed ends, frequently left on a tussock, log or stone. It bristles with fur, feathers, bone fragments and fruit pips, and the smell is unmistakable.
• Otter spraint: dark, crumbly and full of fish bones and scales, deposited on flat rocks or boulders. Fresh spraint has a surprisingly pleasant scent, often described as jasmine or new-mown hay.
• Deer droppings: small, dark, glossy pellets when fresh, becoming dull and blunt-ended with age. Roe often leave them in a loose pile; fallow tend to scatter them.

Nibbled Nuts, Chewed Cones and Stripped Bark

Hazelnuts are the classic identification test, and autumn is the time to test yourself. Look on stumps, stones and logs where small mammals carry nuts to eat.

• Grey squirrel: a jagged, irregular hole, with the shell often split and the edges rough and splintered.
• Wood mouse: a neat round hole with fine tooth marks, the shell usually left clean and intact around the rim.
• Dormouse: the connoisseur's find, a smooth, perfectly round hole with a distinct inner rim where fine teeth have worked evenly around the edge. Shells are often found in a small pile.
• Voles: a rougher hole without a rim, sometimes with the shell split apart.

Cones tell a similar story. Red squirrels strip the scales neatly, leaving a clean central core with little debris, whilst grey squirrels shred the whole cone and leave scales scattered everywhere. Stripped bark is worth noting too: deer tear vertical patches between one and two metres up, with tooth marks along the edge, whilst grey squirrels take smaller, neater patches higher up. Square or oval holes in dead wood, sometimes in rows, point to woodpeckers, and a stump wedged with cones is their anvil.

Setts, Dreys, Nests and Resting Places

Homes are the most obvious signs of all once you know what you are looking at. A badger sett is a series of large, arched entrances, 20 to 30 cm wide, with spade-heaps of fresh soil outside showing footprints and scratch marks. Discarded bedding, such as dry leaves, bracken and grass, is often dragged towards the entrances, with a latrine nearby.

Dreys can be confused with birds' nests, but squirrel dreys are bulkier and more untidy, built of twigs and leaves in a fork or against a trunk; red squirrel dreys tend to be smaller and neater, often tucked into conifers. Beneath favoured roost trees you may find owl pellets, grey and felted, packed with fur and tiny bones. Small holes scraped in leaf litter, sometimes with a nut shell nearby, are the caches of jays and squirrels.

Fieldcraft and Low-Impact Practice

Reading the wood well means leaving it as you found it. Keep to paths where you can, and if you turn a log to look beneath, replace it exactly as it was and keep the disturbance brief. Badger setts are protected by law, and dormouse nests and their breeding sites are protected too, so observe from a distance and never dig or probe.

Keep dogs close around setts in spring, when cubs are below ground, and avoid lingering at active entrances. Photograph what you find with a coin or boot alongside for scale, and note the date, weather and habitat; a few years of notes will reveal patterns no single walk can. Finish by washing your hands, and taking nothing away but a clearer picture of the wood and its hidden residents.