About the WTI

& Instructor Bios

 

 

Our Mission:

Elevate Wildlife Tracking in the Personal and Professional Arenas

Wildlife tracking is both a field science, and a way to read the landscape to form deep connection with your surroundings. Tracking is capable of producing reliable data for conservation and land management, as well as landscape-scale relationships for individuals and communities. But despite their potential in both the professional and personal/community realm, tracking skills are almost completely missing from our broader conversations about conservation and ecological education. Most field researchers have limited exposure to the evidence-based skills of tracking, and most regular folks have only heard about tracking as a long-lost, old-time skill.

The WTI aims to change that, by re-introducing the public and professional cohorts to the hard skills of wildlife tracking, and demonstrating how useful and important they truly are. Many academics have written about the lack of ecological literacy among scientists, and cultural pundits relate our lack of connection to the natural world to our inability to adequately conserve the natural systems on which our survival depends. But once you've gained even a small amount of familiarity with wildlife tracking, it's clear to see how tracking, in concert with other field skills and educational models, can help stop and reverse these trends.

Join us in the field, and see for yourself how powerful these skills of observation and interpretation truly are, and the deeply meaningful data and connection they generate.

Who Is The Wildlife Tracking Institute?

The WTI is led by dedicated and passionate teachers, all of whom hold multiples of CyberTracker’s highest Track & Sign certifications—Professional and Specialist—and have spent thousands of hours in the field and classroom, honing our tracking proficiency and our mentoring skills. Our flagship program is our hands-on, 5-month Southwest Tracking Intensive, in which nature itself becomes your classroom. Our weekends together will be held almost entirely in the field.

We are eager to help guide other enthusiastic trackers, whether your main goal is to build a connection to the land where you live, or to earn a Professional or Specialist certificate.

Jonathan Shapiro

Lead Instructor, administrator

Jonathan's home base is in the small town of Hardwick, in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, with a huge beaver wetland behind his house. He is the lead instructor at the Wildlife Tracking Institute, having attained three Professional certificates and two Specialist certificates in track and sign—each in different bioregions of North America. He also holds a Professional certificate in trailing. He tracks and teaches across North America and internationally, working with conservation NGOs, land trusts, government employees, and the general public.

Jonathan's teaching philosophy emphasizes deep connection with the natural world. He crafts his courses to help students develop both technical proficiency and ecological awareness—factual understanding of our wild surroundings mixed with wonder and presence. Jonathan's extensive teaching and evaluation experience has given him unique insights into the learning process—pattern recognition and evidence analysis, managing the psychological aspects of field assessment, and curiosity and ecological storytelling.

His first mentor was Dan Gardoqui, who showed him just how far it's possible to take the tracking and awareness skillsets. After taking his first class with Dan and Amy Beal in 2017, Jonathan was hooked. He took any tracking class that came his way, especially with Nate Harvey and George Leoniak, and signed up for every tracking certification he could find. He soon realized how important these skills are for conservation and building ecological literacy, and the WTI was born.

Jonathan has worked with countless students, as well as nature centers, land trusts, governmental agencies, wildlife managers, and conservation organizations. One of his primary goals as a teacher and mentor is to see tracking brought back to cultural prominence as an art and a science.

Never content to look only at the details, Jonathan is also interested in the bigger questions behind tracking and ecological assessment. In a class, he might digress from the tracks in front of him to discuss the evolutionary history of our tracking abilities as a species, how intuition operates neurologically, why bird song sounds like it does, or any number of other fascinating and geeky questions.

Jonathan's naturalist practice goes beyond tracking—he's a passionate botanist and birder, and teaches the natural history curriculum at Sterling College. He's happy to report that all his courses are field-based, including Field Botany, Field Ornithology, and Field Mammalogy.

When he's not out tracking or hunting, you'll find him running on back roads, exercising at the gym, making traditional handcrafts, or reading books by the wood stove. 

Click here to read what previous students say about Jonathan's teaching style.

Rachel Pelham

Instructor

Rachel is a tracker, trailer, birder, and naturalist based in central Vermont. She has tracked extensively across the United States and Canada, earning Track & Sign Specialist certificates in both the forests of New England and the deserts of Southern California. She also holds two Professional Track & Sign Certificates (New England and Washington state), and a Trailing Level III.

Rachel’s curiosity, levity, and sharp observational skills make every nature outing a joyful hunt for new mysteries. She is easily distracted by most natural phenomena, and will definitely NOT keep up on a hike. Trained as an attorney, Rachel brings her analytical mindset and quest for deeper understanding to her reading of the landscape. She is especially drawn to the tender activities of daily life in the animal world, and will reliably inspect any natural hole or cavity to see what is inside.

When not birding, tracking, or botanizing, Rachel can be found putzing in her gardens or buried in the latest queer fantasy or sci-fi series. In her very corporate day job in management consulting, she helps people and businesses use AI more ethically and responsibly.

Dick Chadwick

Instructor

Dick is a lifelong resident of Southern California. As a kid, his dad would take him out looking for snakes and lizards in the Anza Borrego desert. They'd cruise the roads after the sun went down, and watch as reptiles came out to warm themselves on the heat of the pavement.

He's been doing this ever since, and finding reptiles as a young boy turned into a lifelong fascination with animals and the natural world. Dick is a consummate naturalist, an excellent tracker, and WTI's resident reptile and amphibian expert.

In classes, Dick's relaxed nature and endless curiosity never fail to uncover interesting animal sign. You'll likely find him flipping over bark looking for scorpions, or chasing lizards around in the desert scrub.

He has earned three Professional certificates in track and sign from Tracker Certification North America, and continues to hone his tracking craft as a transect leader with the San Diego Tracking Team.

Dick travels extensively across North America to track and learn about animals and natural history. His most recent trips were to the Swan Valley in Montana, and Valley of Fire State Park in Nevada. When not out tracking, Dick likes to tend his gardens and houseplants at home in San Diego.

Terry Hunefeld

Instructor Emeritus

Terry holds two Professional Certificates and a Specialist Track & Sign Certificate from Tracker Certification North America. His evaluation record includes four perfect scores at the 100% level.

Terry and his wife live in the tiny desert village of Borrego Springs, California, surrounded by a thousand square miles of Sonoran Desert wilderness ringed with mountain ranges—known as the Anza Borrego Desert State Park. 

On Earth Day 1988, Terry (living in Grand Rapids, Michigan at the time) was in a bookstore featuring a big table of “Earth Day” books.  He picked up a copy of “Down The River” by an author he did not recognize—Edward Abbey.  After reading a few pages, he was hooked. 

Over the course of the next two years Terry read every book Abbey wrote (23 of them!) and began traveling to the desert southwest to wilderness camp under the stars in the deserts of California, Utah and Arizona.  Fascinated by desert ecosystems, Terry and his family moved to San Diego County in 1998 and began exploring the vast wilderness of the Anza Borrego Desert State Park (ABDSP) twenty or more weekends each year. 

After 13 years of wilderness backpacking, hiking, car camping, birding and botanizing in the desert, Terry and his wife Ann moved permanently to the little desert village of Borrego Springs in 2012.  Terry learned of the San Diego Tracking Team in 2018 and discovered his true passion—wildlife tracking. 

  • TCNA Specialist Track & Sign Certification - 2024
  • TCNA Professional Track & Sign Certification, San Diego County – 2024
  • TCNA Professional Track & Sign Certification, Albuquerque, NM - 2025
  • TCNA 100% on Track & Sign Certification, The North Woods, Wisconsin, August 2025.
  • Terry has participated in more than 44 TCNA certifications since 2020 all over the world. From SoCal to Vermont, Florida to Washington—plus four weeks in Africa—building tracking skills for sign recognition of all North American species in varying habitats. 
  • San Diego Tracking Team Wildlife Survey Leader, 2022 – present
  • Level 1,2,3 San Diego Tracking Team Naturalist/Tracker Certifications, 2019-2020
  • California State Parks Naturalist, 2016 - present
  • Anza Borrego Foundation Desert Naturalist and Trip Leader/Interpreter  2016 - present
  • Anza Borrego Desert State Park Naturalist and Field Trip Leader 2016- present
  • Anza Borrego Desert Botany Society Vice-President -  2017- 2010
  • Naturalist & Trip Leader, 2015-present
  • NOAA Fisheries Science Center, On-Board NOAA Ship Bird Census Volunteer, 2008-2010
  • San Diego Field Ornithologists, Rare Bird Moderator 2012-2020
  • eBird San Diego County Low Desert Reviewer Moderator, 2012 – 2020
  • Southern California Audubon Societies Pelagic Bird Coordinator & Outings Leader, 2006-2012
  • Oceanside CA Audubon Christmas Bird Count Coordinator and Leader - 2006-2012
  • Sierra Club, San Diego Chapter, Certified Outings Leader, 2002-2008
  • San Diego Natural History Museum Naturalist & Hike Leader, 2002-2006
  • Mission Trails Regional Park Naturalist & Hike Leader, 2003-2008
  • Anza Borrego Foundation, Board of Trustees, 2018-2021
  • Anza Borrego Desert Natural History Association Naturalist and Trip Leader 2012 to present
  • San Diego Tracking Team Board of Directors, 2021-present
  • San Diego Tracking Team TCNA-CyberTracker Training Coordinator, 2021-present