Sharman Apt Russell, What Walks This Way: Discovering the Wildlife Around Us Through Their Tracks and Signs

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What Walks This Way

Did a red fox pass this way? Could that be a bobcat print there in the dirt? Do those tracks belong to a domestic dog or a coyote? Combining lyrical memoir with an introduction to wildlife tracking, What Walks This Way explores the joys of learning to recognize the traces of the creatures with whom we share our world.

The nature writer Sharman Apt Russell tells stories of her experiences tracking wildlife―mostly mammals, from mountain lions to pocket mice―near her home in New Mexico, with lessons that hold true across North America. With wit and compassion, she guides readers through the basics of identifying tracks and signs, revealing a landscape filled with the marks left by browsing deer, predatory weasels, and inquisitive bears, skunks, and raccoons. Closely observing these traces, Russell also finds community, a sense of place, and a renewed connection with the nonhuman world. She explores the health of mammal populations in North America and questions common wildlife-management practices, calling for new approaches that better reflect current understandings of ecology. Above all, What Walks This Way is a celebration of all the wild animals secretly, stubbornly, and triumphantly roving through our cities, suburbs, and countryside.

First and Wildest: The Gila Wilderness at 100, edited by Elizabeth Hightower with contributions from Martha Schumann, Michael P. Berman, Philip Connors, Beto O'Rourke, Martin Heinrich, Pam Houston, Priyanka Kumar, Laura Paskus, Sharman Apt Russell, Jakob Sedig, Leeanna T. Torres, and JJ Amaworo Wilson

In the summer of 1922, Aldo Leopold traveled on horseback up into the headwaters of New Mexico's Gila River and proposed to his bosses at the Forest Service that 500,000 acres of that rough country be set aside as roadless wilderness. Thus was born America's first—the world's first—designated wilderness. A century later, writer–activists, including Indigenous voices, come together to celebrate this vast, rugged landscape, the Yellowstone of the Southwest. 

In 2024, the Gila Wilderness area celebrates its 100th birthday as the world's First Designated Wilderness. For more on the celebrations during this year, visit the Gila National Forest Service

About the Sharman Apt Russell

Sharman Apt Russell teaches at the low-residency MFA program at Antioch University in Los Angeles and is a professor emeritus at Western New Mexico University. She is the author of a dozen books and winner of the 2016 John Burroughs Medal for Distinguished Natural History Writing.

About Martha Schumann

Martha Schumann is the Freshwater Program Director at the The Nature Conservancy of New Mexico,  where manages restoration, monitoring and stewardship projects on the Gila and Mimbres River Preserves.