There is a particular pleasure in walking a woodland path after rain, when the whole wood seems to have signed the visitors' book. Mud holds detail better than any other surface, and a quiet hour spent reading it will teach you more about the mammals around you than a season spent hoping to catch a glimpse. None of it requires specialist kit — just soft ground, patience, and a rough idea of what you are looking at.

Where to Look: Soft Ground and Muddy Choke Points

Animals are creatures of habit, and they funnel through the same gaps you do. Rather than wandering at random, concentrate your attention on the places where every passing creature must put its feet down.

• Gateways, stiles and the mouths of tracks where paths meet.
• Puddles, damp hollows and the edges of streams, where prints stay sharp for days.
• Bare earth beneath bridges, along fence lines and at the foot of hedges.
• Thin snow or frost-softened ground, which reveals a whole night's travelling at a glance.

Early morning is best, before rain, dogs and boots erase the evidence. Take a tape measure, or use a bank card (about 85mm) for scale, and photograph prints from directly overhead — images taken at an angle are almost impossible to compare afterwards. Note the gait as well as the print: a walking animal leaves a staggered line, a trotting one a straighter sequence, a bounding one a pattern of pairs and gaps.

Deer: Slots, Fraying and Neat Piles of Pellets

Deer leave cloven hooves, so their prints form a slot: two tapered, heart-shaped halves that narrow towards the front, usually with no claw marks. Size is your quickest clue. A roe deer slot is barely 3cm long and neat as a pencil point; fallow prints are broader and splay in soft mud; red deer slots can reach 8cm and look almost bovine. Where the ground is deep, look behind the slot for two small dots — the dewclaws, which only register when the animal is sinking or running.

Look up from the ground and the story continues. Roe fray saplings, stripping bark with their antlers, leaving shredded stems at about knee height. In winter, deer strip bark from young trees in vertical scars, and their narrow paths thread through bracken as low tunnels with clear sides. Droppings are equally useful: roe leave small dark pellets, pointed at one end, often in loose clusters; fallow and red leave larger oval pellets, sometimes clumped into a single winter mass.

Badgers: Setts, Latrines and Five-Toed Prints

A badger print is a delight to find. It shows five toes set in a broad arc ahead of a wide, kidney-shaped pad, with long, blunt claw marks in front of each toe. The overall shape is almost like a small, splayed hand — nothing else in the wood looks quite like it.

Around the print, the wider evidence of a sett is unmistakable:

• Large, D-shaped entrances in a bank or slope, with a fan of freshly dug spoil outside.
• Well-worn paths radiating between entrances, often dusted with coarse grey and black hair on fence wires.
• Latrines: shallow scrapes at territorial boundaries and along paths, containing dark droppings, sometimes with a runnel beside them.
• Snuffle holes: small conical pits in turf or bluebell ground where badgers have rooted for worms and grubs.

Setts are protected by law, so admire from a distance, keep dogs well away and never dig or block an entrance.

Foxes: Slim Prints and a Scat on a Tussock

Fox prints show four toes and a narrow, compact pad with claws usually visible. They are slimmer and neater than a dog's, roughly 4–5cm long, and when a fox walks it tends to travel in an almost straight line along paths, field edges and woodland rides, placing its feet with tidy precision.

The fox's calling card, though, is its scat. Look on top of a tussock, a stone, a log or at a path junction: a twisted, tapering dropping with pointed ends, often containing fur, feathers, bone fragments and — in autumn — berry pips. Fresh ones smell powerfully musky. Nearby you may find scratched earth where a fox has dug for rabbits, and a scatter of feathers at a plucking site.

Squirrels: Cones, Nuts and Bounding Pairs

Grey squirrel prints appear in pairs, the small front feet landing ahead of the larger hind feet, with the tail sometimes dragging a faint line between them. Front prints show four toes, hind prints five.

Feeding signs are easier to find than prints. A stripped pine cone is the giveaway: squirrels chew away the scales and leave a ragged, chewed top on a bare core. Mice and voles, by contrast, work neatly, leaving tidy edges and a smooth core. Squirrels crack hazelnuts by splitting the shell into halves with a chiselled inner rim, while mice bore a round hole. Add to this the leafy ball of a drey — most obvious in late summer and again when winter strips the trees bare — and the fresh, gnawed bark on young trees, and you have a full picture of a busy grey.

A Field Walk: Reading the Signs Together

Try this on your next wander. Stand at a muddy gateway and identify the slots heading into the wood; note their size and direction. Follow the path until it forks, then check the puddle at the junction for fox and badger prints overlaying older deer tracks. A few metres further on, a latrine or a scat on a tussock will confirm who has been patrolling. Under a likely tree, a chewed cone settles the squirrel question in seconds.

Record what you find — date, weather, print size, direction of travel — and compare notes across the seasons; the same paths tell different stories in January and July. Wash your hands after handling anything, avoid disturbing setts or nests, and leave the wood as you found it. The best tracking is the kind that changes nothing except your understanding of the place.