16 ms·

How A Bedouin Tracker Sees the Desert

138 points by Thevet 4y ago

mike10921 4y ago
Marvelous, these people are so connected to the land they see and feel things that very few do.
- Ancapistani 4y ago
  You can get some of this feeling from spending a large amount of time in a given area. I grew up in a house on about five acres in the country, and spent a lot of time outdoors reading. I grew to know the area, the types of animals that lived there, where they tended to move and where they stopped, and learned to recognize the individual animals. Animal behavior alone can tell you quite a bit - have you ever been in the woods and suddenly felt a little uneasy? That's probably because you unconsciously noticed that the background noise changed. Birds and small animals got quiet around you because of the presence of a predator.
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    Indeed. I've been backpacking in the wilderness about every month for a few years and, although I rarely encounter anybody when out there, I usually know when a large predator (including human) is getting near because the sounds of the wilderness change. I can't even really describe what changes about it, but it changes. It's nothing obvious like suddenly everything gets quiet or loud. It's subtle, but unmistakable.
- googlryas 4y ago
  In Tristan Gooley's The Walker’s Guide to Outdoor Clues and Signs, he recounts how he traveled to (IIRC) Papua New Guinea to learn more about...outdoor clues and signs... from native people there. Suffice to say, a lot of it is actually just bullshit, but then the parts that aren't BS give some people seeming superpowers in the jungle.
  - smm11 4y ago
    Deliverance taught me that you can't outrun someone who has never left an area.
user3939382 4y ago
I've been interested in this tribe ever since watching Lawrence of Arabia, maybe also being from the desert myself. They're amazingly adapted to a hostile environment.
strulovich 4y ago
During my service in the Israeli army I had the pleasure of working with various Bedouin trackers. It was the closest experience to what working with a wizard would be. They would look at something where you see nothing, and tell whole stories. Too bad we were all too tired to actually spend more time asking questions and learning from them. I also heard the legend of a person who installed backward soles on their shoes so it would fool the trackers thinking they’re going the other way, but the weight distribution gave this trick away as the tracks looked odd to them.
- cik 4y ago
  Classic legend. I remember staying in Mamshit and getting a fantastic demonstration from a Bedouin on exactly why this doesn't work. He brought out a tape measure, in order to physically show the difference. It's mind blowing that the attention to detail is so high, that they could notice a 1.5cm indentation difference - and not at eye level!
  - toss1 4y ago
    >>that they could notice a 1.5cm indentation difference - and not at eye level! Yes, their trained eye can most likely see far more than any of us. One thing I learned in neuroscience courses about perception is that one of the measures they take is the lower bound sensitivity of the perceptual system. One of the units is the JND = Just Noticeable Difference, which is well self-descriptive; find the smallest difference between two things that can be noticed. E.g., what is the smallest difference in pressure that is noticeable on a fingertip, tone or volume difference between two sounds, or the smallest size difference noticeable between two objects, etc.? It turns out that top experts in any skill can have a JND that is about 10x finer than the average person. Moreover, they can not even know it! I weirdly experienced this myself when I was one of the subjects in a test of discrimination of light brightness levels on a field with subtle differences. As they turned down the brightness in each round (and randomly moved the darker/lighter zones), the dark/light areas were completely obvious to me when everyone else swore that it was absolutely flat/even. I could only chalk it up to a decade of alpine ski racing training that had gotten me to top international racing levels — much of it was racing/training in flat light of cloudy days in snowfields — where we need to discern at high speed even the subtlest variations in shades of white to get critical information about snow conditions or contours. Until that test, I literally had no idea that anything was exceptional about my perceptual ability in this regard (my experience was generally that I wanted to see better), but training obviously drove changes down to the level of tuning the nervous system, even without specific intent to do so. Science is so cool, and so are those Bedouin trackers!
doodlebugging 4y ago
The Israelis took advantage of native Bedouin tracking skills in the same way that the US Army employed Native American scouts during the Indian Wars. The skills that one picks up from a lifetime of living outdoors in a natural environment can't be taught from a book. They are skills that you get from hands-on experience.
- abdulhaq 4y ago
  I'm wondering if the bedouin Arabs escaped the expulsion in the 1948 exodus?
  - doodlebugging 4y ago
    I suspect that we both know that the answer to that question is that they have not escaped resettlement as Israeli settlements have pushed further into territories that they (the Israelis) claim. If I remember, there is a large area that is traditional Bedouin land and where they formerly had a fair degree of autonomy for years (after 1948) but as settlements expand in the last couple decades especially, they are being moved to make way for new Israeli settlers. I have followed maps over the years showing the expansion of Israeli claims and for that reason, it is unlikely to me that Bedouin people living on land where their people lived for generations, will not be affected by the expansion of Israel's territorial claims. I am not an authority on the subject by any measure and welcome any corrections. In general, the history of mankind doesn't favor indigenous people, regardless of how well they know their home environment. This is why so much historical knowledge is lost to later generations.
    - seer-zig 4y ago
      Back in the day, Arabs would send their children to the desert so that they would learn proper Arabic, as it was the most pure form, not mixed with other tongues or dialects. Not to mention learning other skills like survivability and patience and so on. Fortunately, the Muslims went to great length to preserve the history and culture, even as globalization etches away at it. There's a reason we take great pride in how our religion and traditions have been preserved (all by the Grace of God of course).
photochemsyn 4y ago
This seems like a good idea: > "Walidie sees himself as an envoy of Bedouin traditions, including tracking. He aspires to educate new generations of “desert children,” to “wean them off iPhones, acquaint them with the natural environment of the desert, and teach them how to preserve it.”"
kerblang 4y ago
In case you're wondering what that pink thing sticking out of the camel's mouth in the picture is, it's called a "dulla", and it's normal. It's also pretty gross but feel free to google it and indulge yourself in camel obnoxity.
- pdmccormick 4y ago
  I had not expected to spend 5 minutes learning about this today, but thank you nonetheless for the tip off.
simple10 4y ago
About 10 years ago, I had the pleasure of spending a few nights in a Bedouin camp. It's difficult to describe how different the world looks from the desert. Not just the immediate surroundings but how the desert shapes their entire world view. It feels like a completely different timeline. Like a parallel world looking through a spyglass to the modern world passing on the horizon. One night, a sand storm kicked up and started rumbling the tents. We were in temporary tents for guests and not traditional Bedouin tents. I remember looking up at the tent poles, watching them shake. Then in an instant, the tent just disappeared, going from the blackness of the tent to the most intense canvas of stars in the night sky. The wind had plucked the entire tent and threw it across camp. The next day, I had tea with one of the Bedouin guides. Her eyes were bright blue like the Fremen in Dune. When she found out I grew up in Colorado, she said it's been a childhood dream of her's to visit. I thought at first it was because of the mountains, but then she pulled out a picture she kept with her. It was a large reservoir in the foothills outside of Denver. She dreamed of one day being able to swim in so much fresh water. Much of Western Civilization is culturally rooted in the mythology of the desert. Its impact is often forgotten but runs surprisingly deep.
- noja 4y ago
  Wow what a great comment. Please write more.
  - simple10 4y ago
    Thanks noja. I'll try to add more later today.
- sonofhans 4y ago
  This reminds of of what Prince Feisal said in Lawrence of Arabia: > I think you are another of these desert-loving English: Doughty, Stanhope, Gordon of Khartoum. No Arab loves the desert. We love water and green trees, there is nothing in the desert. No man needs nothing.
  - DoreenMichele 4y ago
cheese_van 4y ago
Long ago, I had the pleasure of being in a two car convoy in the Syrian desert looking for a particular castle deep and isolated in the desert (we were Foreign Service). We had the galley draft for Monuments of Syria as a guide. We were somewhat lost. Over the horizon, we could see dust, then as the dust got closer, we could see a huge herd of camel headed straight for us. So we stayed put, ought to be interesting. Probably about 300 camels. With two Bedu kids driving them. The oldest maybe 15 or 16 or so. The other probably about 14 years old. They stopped to gawk at us, just as we were gawking at them. "How many camels do you have," we asked. They shrugged. "Where are you coming from?" we asked. They pointed behind them. "Where are you going?" They pointed in front of them. Then the oldest urged his mount forward, and we watched them disappear over the desert horizon. Syria was one of the most interesting places in the world to visit before it came to its present heartbreaking condition.
mariodiana 4y ago
I recommend the travelogue Arabian Sands, by William Thesiger. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabian_Sands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabian_Sands
aaron695 4y ago
WalterBright 4y ago
Reminds me of how the Comanche were complete masters of their environment in the American southwest.
ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
I love that article! Thanks so much for sharing it!
AlbertCory 4y ago
There is a similar phenomenon with the indigenous people up in the Arctic. Where most people would just see a bunch of snow and get lost immediately, they can tell exactly where they are and how to get home. The clues are there if you can read them. There's some story I read, can't remember where, where a visitor asks an old man "who knows more - the wolf or the old man?" The guy thought a long time and finally said, "The same. They both know the same."
jonah 4y ago
Tracking is a fascinating subject. In Search and Rescue, it is one of the pillars of our skillset. I just came off three days of participation in this search†. Depending on the area, terrain, environment, and situation, tracking to either directly locate the subject or narrow the search area can be a crucial task leading to the resolution of an incident. † https://www.noozhawk.com/article/search_for_hiker_missing_on_gaviota_trail_now_in_3rd_day https://www.noozhawk.com/article/search_for_hiker_missing_on... https://keyt.com/news/santa-barbara-s-county/2022/09/07/search-continues-for-missing-hiker-near-gaviota-peak/ https://keyt.com/news/santa-barbara-s-county/2022/09/07/sear... https://www.noozhawk.com/article/body_of_missing_hiker_found_in_gaviota_after_intensive_search https://www.noozhawk.com/article/body_of_missing_hiker_found... https://keyt.com/news/santa-barbara-s-county/2022/09/08/tim-sgrinoli-hiker-who-went-missing-from-gaviota-trail-found-dead-days-later/ https://keyt.com/news/santa-barbara-s-county/2022/09/08/tim-...
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

138 points by Thevet 4y ago

mike10921 4y ago

Marvelous, these people are so connected to the land they see and feel things that very few do.

Ancapistani 4y ago
You can get some of this feeling from spending a large amount of time in a given area. I grew up in a house on about five acres in the country, and spent a lot of time outdoors reading. I grew to know the area, the types of animals that lived there, where they tended to move and where they stopped, and learned to recognize the individual animals. Animal behavior alone can tell you quite a bit - have you ever been in the woods and suddenly felt a little uneasy? That's probably because you unconsciously noticed that the background noise changed. Birds and small animals got quiet around you because of the presence of a predator.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  Indeed. I've been backpacking in the wilderness about every month for a few years and, although I rarely encounter anybody when out there, I usually know when a large predator (including human) is getting near because the sounds of the wilderness change. I can't even really describe what changes about it, but it changes. It's nothing obvious like suddenly everything gets quiet or loud. It's subtle, but unmistakable.
googlryas 4y ago
In Tristan Gooley's The Walker’s Guide to Outdoor Clues and Signs, he recounts how he traveled to (IIRC) Papua New Guinea to learn more about...outdoor clues and signs... from native people there. Suffice to say, a lot of it is actually just bullshit, but then the parts that aren't BS give some people seeming superpowers in the jungle.
- smm11 4y ago
  Deliverance taught me that you can't outrun someone who has never left an area.

user3939382 4y ago

I've been interested in this tribe ever since watching Lawrence of Arabia, maybe also being from the desert myself. They're amazingly adapted to a hostile environment.

strulovich 4y ago

During my service in the Israeli army I had the pleasure of working with various Bedouin trackers. It was the closest experience to what working with a wizard would be. They would look at something where you see nothing, and tell whole stories. Too bad we were all too tired to actually spend more time asking questions and learning from them. I also heard the legend of a person who installed backward soles on their shoes so it would fool the trackers thinking they’re going the other way, but the weight distribution gave this trick away as the tracks looked odd to them.

cik 4y ago
Classic legend. I remember staying in Mamshit and getting a fantastic demonstration from a Bedouin on exactly why this doesn't work. He brought out a tape measure, in order to physically show the difference. It's mind blowing that the attention to detail is so high, that they could notice a 1.5cm indentation difference - and not at eye level!
- toss1 4y ago
  >>that they could notice a 1.5cm indentation difference - and not at eye level! Yes, their trained eye can most likely see far more than any of us. One thing I learned in neuroscience courses about perception is that one of the measures they take is the lower bound sensitivity of the perceptual system. One of the units is the JND = Just Noticeable Difference, which is well self-descriptive; find the smallest difference between two things that can be noticed. E.g., what is the smallest difference in pressure that is noticeable on a fingertip, tone or volume difference between two sounds, or the smallest size difference noticeable between two objects, etc.? It turns out that top experts in any skill can have a JND that is about 10x finer than the average person. Moreover, they can not even know it! I weirdly experienced this myself when I was one of the subjects in a test of discrimination of light brightness levels on a field with subtle differences. As they turned down the brightness in each round (and randomly moved the darker/lighter zones), the dark/light areas were completely obvious to me when everyone else swore that it was absolutely flat/even. I could only chalk it up to a decade of alpine ski racing training that had gotten me to top international racing levels — much of it was racing/training in flat light of cloudy days in snowfields — where we need to discern at high speed even the subtlest variations in shades of white to get critical information about snow conditions or contours. Until that test, I literally had no idea that anything was exceptional about my perceptual ability in this regard (my experience was generally that I wanted to see better), but training obviously drove changes down to the level of tuning the nervous system, even without specific intent to do so. Science is so cool, and so are those Bedouin trackers!

doodlebugging 4y ago

The Israelis took advantage of native Bedouin tracking skills in the same way that the US Army employed Native American scouts during the Indian Wars. The skills that one picks up from a lifetime of living outdoors in a natural environment can't be taught from a book. They are skills that you get from hands-on experience.

abdulhaq 4y ago
I'm wondering if the bedouin Arabs escaped the expulsion in the 1948 exodus?
- doodlebugging 4y ago
  I suspect that we both know that the answer to that question is that they have not escaped resettlement as Israeli settlements have pushed further into territories that they (the Israelis) claim. If I remember, there is a large area that is traditional Bedouin land and where they formerly had a fair degree of autonomy for years (after 1948) but as settlements expand in the last couple decades especially, they are being moved to make way for new Israeli settlers. I have followed maps over the years showing the expansion of Israeli claims and for that reason, it is unlikely to me that Bedouin people living on land where their people lived for generations, will not be affected by the expansion of Israel's territorial claims. I am not an authority on the subject by any measure and welcome any corrections. In general, the history of mankind doesn't favor indigenous people, regardless of how well they know their home environment. This is why so much historical knowledge is lost to later generations.
  - seer-zig 4y ago
    Back in the day, Arabs would send their children to the desert so that they would learn proper Arabic, as it was the most pure form, not mixed with other tongues or dialects. Not to mention learning other skills like survivability and patience and so on. Fortunately, the Muslims went to great length to preserve the history and culture, even as globalization etches away at it. There's a reason we take great pride in how our religion and traditions have been preserved (all by the Grace of God of course).

photochemsyn 4y ago

This seems like a good idea: > "Walidie sees himself as an envoy of Bedouin traditions, including tracking. He aspires to educate new generations of “desert children,” to “wean them off iPhones, acquaint them with the natural environment of the desert, and teach them how to preserve it.”"

kerblang 4y ago

In case you're wondering what that pink thing sticking out of the camel's mouth in the picture is, it's called a "dulla", and it's normal. It's also pretty gross but feel free to google it and indulge yourself in camel obnoxity.

pdmccormick 4y ago
I had not expected to spend 5 minutes learning about this today, but thank you nonetheless for the tip off.

simple10 4y ago

About 10 years ago, I had the pleasure of spending a few nights in a Bedouin camp. It's difficult to describe how different the world looks from the desert. Not just the immediate surroundings but how the desert shapes their entire world view. It feels like a completely different timeline. Like a parallel world looking through a spyglass to the modern world passing on the horizon. One night, a sand storm kicked up and started rumbling the tents. We were in temporary tents for guests and not traditional Bedouin tents. I remember looking up at the tent poles, watching them shake. Then in an instant, the tent just disappeared, going from the blackness of the tent to the most intense canvas of stars in the night sky. The wind had plucked the entire tent and threw it across camp. The next day, I had tea with one of the Bedouin guides. Her eyes were bright blue like the Fremen in Dune. When she found out I grew up in Colorado, she said it's been a childhood dream of her's to visit. I thought at first it was because of the mountains, but then she pulled out a picture she kept with her. It was a large reservoir in the foothills outside of Denver. She dreamed of one day being able to swim in so much fresh water. Much of Western Civilization is culturally rooted in the mythology of the desert. Its impact is often forgotten but runs surprisingly deep.

noja 4y ago
Wow what a great comment. Please write more.
- simple10 4y ago
  Thanks noja. I'll try to add more later today.
sonofhans 4y ago
This reminds of of what Prince Feisal said in Lawrence of Arabia: > I think you are another of these desert-loving English: Doughty, Stanhope, Gordon of Khartoum. No Arab loves the desert. We love water and green trees, there is nothing in the desert. No man needs nothing.
- DoreenMichele 4y ago

cheese_van 4y ago

Long ago, I had the pleasure of being in a two car convoy in the Syrian desert looking for a particular castle deep and isolated in the desert (we were Foreign Service). We had the galley draft for Monuments of Syria as a guide. We were somewhat lost. Over the horizon, we could see dust, then as the dust got closer, we could see a huge herd of camel headed straight for us. So we stayed put, ought to be interesting. Probably about 300 camels. With two Bedu kids driving them. The oldest maybe 15 or 16 or so. The other probably about 14 years old. They stopped to gawk at us, just as we were gawking at them. "How many camels do you have," we asked. They shrugged. "Where are you coming from?" we asked. They pointed behind them. "Where are you going?" They pointed in front of them. Then the oldest urged his mount forward, and we watched them disappear over the desert horizon. Syria was one of the most interesting places in the world to visit before it came to its present heartbreaking condition.

mariodiana 4y ago

I recommend the travelogue Arabian Sands, by William Thesiger. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabian_Sands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabian_Sands

aaron695 4y ago

WalterBright 4y ago

Reminds me of how the Comanche were complete masters of their environment in the American southwest.

ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago

I love that article! Thanks so much for sharing it!

AlbertCory 4y ago

There is a similar phenomenon with the indigenous people up in the Arctic. Where most people would just see a bunch of snow and get lost immediately, they can tell exactly where they are and how to get home. The clues are there if you can read them. There's some story I read, can't remember where, where a visitor asks an old man "who knows more - the wolf or the old man?" The guy thought a long time and finally said, "The same. They both know the same."

jonah 4y ago

Tracking is a fascinating subject. In Search and Rescue, it is one of the pillars of our skillset. I just came off three days of participation in this search†. Depending on the area, terrain, environment, and situation, tracking to either directly locate the subject or narrow the search area can be a crucial task leading to the resolution of an incident. † https://www.noozhawk.com/article/search_for_hiker_missing_on_gaviota_trail_now_in_3rd_day https://www.noozhawk.com/article/search_for_hiker_missing_on... https://keyt.com/news/santa-barbara-s-county/2022/09/07/search-continues-for-missing-hiker-near-gaviota-peak/ https://keyt.com/news/santa-barbara-s-county/2022/09/07/sear... https://www.noozhawk.com/article/body_of_missing_hiker_found_in_gaviota_after_intensive_search https://www.noozhawk.com/article/body_of_missing_hiker_found... https://keyt.com/news/santa-barbara-s-county/2022/09/08/tim-sgrinoli-hiker-who-went-missing-from-gaviota-trail-found-dead-days-later/ https://keyt.com/news/santa-barbara-s-county/2022/09/08/tim-...

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]