sign

Any visible evidence of an animal's presence or passage — tracks, scat, rubs, scrapes, beds, feeding sign, hair, feathers, scent marks, kill sites, nests, burrows, trails, and disturbances in vegetation or soil. Sign is the general term that contains all the others. A tracker reads sign the way a reader reads text — each mark is a word, each cluster a sentence, and the landscape is the page. The skill is not in seeing any one piece of sign but in assembling the pieces into a story.