Here are the identification keys I use, and the ones I built the site’s quizzes on. They are the reference documents of mountain leader training, published by natural history associations. I gather them here because they are scattered and hard to find when you need them, which is the evening before an outing.
Some are free to download, others cost five euros. I say so each time. These documents belong to their authors: the links go to the associations’ websites, not to copies. All of them are in French.
Tracks, prints and droppings
France Nature Environnement Haute-Savoie publishes two free keys, and they are the best I know for beginners. They work through successive questions, with sizes and outlines side by side.
- Les empreintes sur le sol (prints on the ground), free PDF. Hooves, pads and hands, with the line test that tells a dog from a fox.
- Les crottes, clé simplifiée (droppings, simplified key), free PDF. Often easier to read than a print, and far less sought after.
- La clé des empreintes in A2 format, free PDF, handy to print for an activity.
Owl pellets
Pulling apart a bird of prey’s pellet is the only way to know what it ate without ever seeing it hunt. It is also the activity that works best with children, because it ends on a table covered in tiny skulls.
- The FCPN pellet recognition sheet, free PDF, life size. Barn owl, tawny owl, long-eared owl, eagle owl and little owl on a single page.
- The technical booklet Pelotes !, published by the FCPN, paid. It is the complete document for identifying skulls, and the one that settles whether it was a vole or a wood mouse.
Small creatures of water and soil
For outings by a stream or under a stone, the ATHENA association publishes short, solid keys. They sell for five euros each, which is still the best value on this page.
- The key to small water creatures, six pages, twenty-six of the species most often caught in still or running water.
- The key to small soil creatures, twenty-five species you really find by lifting a stone or a piece of bark.
- The key to small mammals, with a simplified version for children, designed for owl pellets.
Snails
Underrated, and yet it is the one family you can identify with certainty, without a complicated key, in the rain, at three years old as at forty.
- The Opération Escargots identification key, free PDF, designed for a citizen science protocol.
What to take with it
A printed key is useless without three habits. A ruler, or failing that a pen, to give scale in photos. The habit of measuring the greatest length excluding claws, because that is the convention in all these keys. And the rule that you do not touch droppings with bare hands or sniff them, because of parasites.
For the rest, recognising animal tracks in the snow explains when to go out and where to start, and the tracks and signs quiz lets you revise before you leave. If you would rather learn in the field, that is what we do on family outings.
And to revise what these keys contain before you take them out, the quiz on small creatures of water and soil draws on the two ATHENA keys and the amphibian key in thirty-two questions.