Introduction to the Boston Tracking Club

[raccoon prints found on the back side of Coast Guard beach, August 2004. Are they front feet, hind feet, or both?]

Hello All,

For those of you who have not yet heard of the Boston Tracking Club: we are an informal group that meets weekly at the Boston Museum of Science in order to talk about animal tracking, natural history, and wilderness awareness. The club has met in one form or another for over a decade. If you'd like to ask questions or attend one of our meetings, send us an email.

I've set up this blog as a sort of bulletin board for the Tracking Club. We can post articles, share pictures of tracks and animals, and link to books or websites that we want others to see. Since some of us can't attend every Tuesday night meeting, this blog can serve as a way to stay in touch and share information. If the tracking meeting is cancelled on a particular week, we can post that here as well.

In order for you to create posts on this blog, I'll have to add you as a 'member' of the blog. If you'd like to contribute posts, just send an email to me at trackingclub[at]adelphia.net, and I'll add your email address to the list. You will then receive an email from Blogger.com asking you to start a (free) Blogger account. This should be a relatively painless procedure.

Of course, you can always just post to the comment threads or the message board without having to start an account with Blogger.

As the raccoon prints above indicate, we can also post pictures onto this blog. I have been using a free software program for Windows called "Hello", which seems to work well. Blogger has an article here on what sort of software you can use for posting pictures:

Windows users can download the Hello BloggerBot from Picasa to post pictures to their blogs...Mac users (and anyone else, for that matter!) can use BuzzNet or Flickr to photoblog; we posted another Help article that explains how Flickr works.

The text box on the upper right-hand side of the blog, entitled "Message Board [notes, comments, questions]" is called a 'tag board'. This is a small bulletin board on which any visitor to the blog can post. You can use the tag board to post a message outside the comment thread of any particular posting. Note that the tag board messages are ephemeral, and will not be saved in the long-term.

Some tag boards will create pop-up ads in some browsers. The tag board installed on this blog should not create pop-ups. If you see pop-up ads appearing when you load this page, please send me an email to let me know. Also, don't hesitate to email me if you have questions or problems, or if you think something about the blog should be changed.

Thank you!

Justin