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First published in the Feb. 1997 Foxprint. Special thanks to Jon Young
S.Ha.G.: Meaning: Slow, Harmonic, Gait
In the study of animal tracking it becomes extremely troublesome to beginners to try to wade through all the different language choices that trackers and authors on the subject of tracking and mammal studies have made in naming the gaits of animals. You’ll find that while some of these trackers are naturalists and trackers with great skills in the field, they’ve never gotten together to form any kind of conventional language around the subject of animal tracking.
So therefore you’ll hear one person calling something a loper and another one calling the same animal a bounder, you’ll find people referring to walks and trots with different meaning, different speeds indicated when they talk about a walk or a trot and so for this reason we want to toss all of that out and introduce the baseline gait behavior of animals.
To understand the word baseline, basically it means that animals have a preferred behavior that they like to operate in most of the time. For an animal such as a coyote, the baseline behavior is the hunt where they’re traveling over a long distance traveling at the same speed during this whole period using their nose to pickup fresh scents.
For a deer it may be moving along through the landscape at a certain speed nipping at a bud here, picking at a green there, maintaining pretty much a constant average speed as it moves through the landscape. These are called baseline behaviors. Other baseline behaviors include resting or sleeping, territorial behavior such as males fighting over territories with one another, also singing when you’re talking about birds, these are all baseline behaviors.
Basically what they say to you is that when animals are in their baseline it means that they feel comfortable enough to follow their normal behavior patterns. Anything that is a departure from baseline behavior represents, for the most part, either hiding, escaping or pursuing or it might indicate playing at certain times. So the baseline gait of an animal is the speed which they prefer to move at most often. The baseline gait is what we call in animal tracking, the Slow Harmonic Gait or the S.Ha.G.
The reason we’ve named it this is because animal body mechanics arebased on physical equations which maximize the use of energy and allow the animal to move at a comfortable speed suitable to it’s particular strategies for survival. For instance since the coyote’s nose is such an excellent tool for detection of scents in the environment, since the coyote relies so much on its nostrils the coyote can move at a faster Slow Harmonic Gait than can, say a cat whose Slow Harmonic Gait is dependent on the fact that cats need to use their eyes as their dominant sense pattern, so they have to move slower and stop frequently.
Through the forces of nature and evolution, whatever they may be, these animals have evolved these perfect harmonic motions which are completely a reflection of their body mechanics. They have pendulums swinging which are their limbs that have a certain length and a certain momentum that cause the animals to fall into a very specific, what I’m going to call a vibrational or harmonic, state of movement.
This movement is perfectly balanced and dynamic and uses the least amount of energy very similar to the way in which a clock spring moves, a very sophisticated and finely built watch or clock. Just the minimal amount of energy input allows the animal to continue at the speed that they’re following. This is what is known as their Slow Harmonic Gait or S.Ha.G.
In most of the long legged animals, the S.Ha.G. represents an evenly spaced evenly “tempoed” spacing of the notes of their footprints across the sheets of music which is the landscape, so it is very easy to recognize.
With birds they have the same behavior known as baseline and is represented by their feeding, hopping along the ground and looking for seeds or scratching for insects in the leaf litter or sitting atop a tree branch and singing or moving about chasing one another to get a feather from each other like in the case of swallows when they’re playing their feather games, these are all baseline behaviors. Anything that is a departure from that represents what we consider some form of alarm which is the beginning of understanding the bird behavior.
Learn to recognize these baseline behaviors, each animals S.Ha.G. and anything that varies from them, and you will be making a big step to interpreting tracks, recognizing moods, weaving stories from footprints when animal tracking.
Jon Young is a naturalist, tracker and bird language expert. He runs a variety programs in California. He is founder of WIlderness Awareness School and author of the Kamana Naturalist Training Program, which is a wonderful primer for learning animal tracking.
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