Every Spot in Jeopardy, Wilderness Instructor Says

In the undeveloped canyons and few remaining open spaces of the Palos Verdes Peninsula, fox and quail and other forms of wildlife flourish in small pockets of wilderness--but not for long.

That’s the observation of Jim Lowery, 47, a self-taught wildlife expert and tracking instructor from San Pedro who can follow the footprints of a red fox and tell you how fast it was traveling, where it was headed and what it had to eat along the way. Often, the trail scoots under fences, crosses culverts and skirts encroaching subdivisions and busy roads.

Lowery’s outlook for the future of the open spaces in upscale cities such as Rancho Palos Verdes is gloomy.

“Every open spot I find is in some kind of jeopardy,” he said. “It’s either going to be developed or being plowed under to prevent wildfire. . . . It’s tragic.”

His words aren’t protests so much as observations. He is describing what he has seen in the four years since he founded his “Earth Skills” school and began teaching tracking and wilderness survival skills.

The school’s goal is not to teach people how to hunt or catch wild animals, but to understand the animals and let them teach the students about their natural ways of life.

“The emphasis is on a different way of looking at wild things. . . . It’s about connecting with nature,” he explained as he walked along a steep trail through the coastal sage scrub. “You must slow your mind down, take your time, let it all come to you.”

Once, as the slightly built, bearded man sat quietly in the grass atop a vacant hill overlooking the entrance to Los Angeles Harbor, a terrified rabbit came fleeing past with a female red fox on its heels. In that instant, the fox also saw Lowery.

“You could see her indecision. There was the rabbit and there I was. She looked back at the rabbit and then broke off the chase. I’d spoiled her meal,” he said.

“Now there are houses on that hilltop. The fox and the rabbit are gone.”

A former Business Week reporter with a master’s degree in German literature, Lowery worked for a while as a fund raiser for the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles before making the switch to wildlife tracker and teacher.

“I took a year off because I needed time to think about what I really wanted to do,” he explained. Always interested in the outdoors and wildlife, Lowery read a book by Tom Brown, a master tracker from the East Coast, then took courses from Brown. “I wanted something rigorous and challenging and I found it,” he said.

That was 1985. For a couple of years after that, Lowery honed his woodland skills on trips to the Sierra and studied tracking in his own back yard, the Palos Verdes Peninsula. In 1988, he and his wife, Mary Brooks, established the school and started teaching weekend courses as part of the Rancho Palos Verdes city parks and recreation program.

Although the couple conduct dozens of classes in such diverse wild land areas as the redwood forests near Santa Cruz, the Sierra high country and the Anza-Borrego desert, Lowery’s favored spots are on the peninsula, only a few miles from his San Pedro home.

It is here in quiet, out-of-the-way places such as Rancho Palos Verdes’ old quarry bowl or the undeveloped shoreline bluffs that he finds evidence of the peninsula’s remarkable variety of wildlife.

There are gray and red foxes, cottontail rabbits, raccoons, opossums and spotted and striped skunks. There are no coyotes or bobcats now, but Lowery speculates that feral dogs and cats fill the predatory niches left open by the absence of these wild hunters.

There are a dozen smaller types of creatures, birds, rodents and reptiles that have survived the pressures of urbanization. Wood rats--sometimes called pack rats--live in the cactus, along with tiny cactus wrens and gnatcatchers. Mice and shrews scurry about in the brush.

Most of these creatures are nocturnal. The only daytime signs of their existence are the tracks and scat they’ve left behind. The evidence is found in the dirt amid signs left by joggers, bike riders and people running their dogs.

Walking along a dusty gravel trail in the old quarry crisscrossed by the wheeled tracks and shoe prints, Lowery stopped, then dropped to one knee and pointed.

“It’s a cottontail. See? Its two front feet together, here,” he pointed, and then pointed again. “And here the rear feet wide apart. He was running along, but here’s where he stopped and it looks like something startled him.” He pointed to faint variations in the tracks in the dust.

Tracks tell a story an expert can read. The skill is most often connected to American Indians and frontier lawmen, but it is also used by deputies searching for suspects and rescuers hunting for lost campers. Lowery uses his skills to bring his students close to nature.

“I’m not a hunter, nor are most of our students. They come to our classes because they want to be more connected to the natural order of things,” he said. “Most of them are people who like outdoors--hikers, backpackers--and they just want to know what is going on around them.”

The classes range from basic one-day tracking and nature awareness outings to far more complex, five-day tracking and skills workshops in the mountains or deserts that emphasize wilderness survival training. The classes vary in size from 12 to 15, and the cost ranges from $45 for the one-day course to $135 for the week.

Lowery said 1,200 students have taken Earth Skills courses. They range in age from teen-agers to people in their 70s. They all learn to put in their “dirt time.”

That phrase refers to studying the tracks close up, and spending time in the dirt to see what forms of life live and travel through a small area.

“Spend an hour studying a square yard of ground and pretty soon you begin to see things,” Lowery said. “Like once I saw this tiny red spider spinning the smallest web I’d ever seen. It was marvelous.”

And it all can be done on the peninsula.

“There’s so much to explore and see here,” he said.