Tracker Academy | The Plum Foundation

Tracker Academy’s work aims to prove that wildlife tracking is a legitimate and vital conservation management skill.

What we do

Tracker Academy aims to prove that ancient tracking skills are relevant in modern conservation management efforts.

The vision is for highly trained professional trackers to provide for global environmental needs. These include eco-tourism, animal monitoring and habituation, conservation education and wildlife protection.

Due to rapid urbanisation and the legacy of apartheid’s of forced removals, traditional tracking skills have fast disappeared over the last 50 years.

Wildlife tracking is an indigenous art form that evolved for reasons of human survival. It has often misrepresented as an unexplainable and mystical skill possessed only by a privileged few. This misconception has delayed the formal adoption of tracking as a valuable conservation management skillset that can be professionally trained and evaluated.

Training Operations

Sixteen (16) recruits trained on a yearlong formally accredited Conservation Guardianship programme incorporating both specialist tracking skills (bushcraft) and combat training.

Recruits undergo continuous psychometric and integrity testing as an essential part of a proven and rigorous selection process (refer Tracker Academy’s 12-year 94% deployment success record).