Kersey Lawrence’s career has brought her around the world to track animals in the wild, but it’s the forest behind her childhood home in Ledyard that she credits with getting her there.

“I grew up with 50 acres of woods behind me that I could go out into every day,” she said. “We would wake up every morning and go out into the woods and not come back until the evening.”

Lawrence, 45, is a doctoral student at the University of Connecticut who splits her time between the United State and South Africa, where she is a wildlife guide, tracker and educator. Through the South Africa-based environmental monitoring organization CyberTracker, she is the only female senior tracker in the world and the only senior tracker to complete her certification internationally.

To do that, she had to be certified as a specialist in both trailing, and track and sign. While track and sign includes identifying and interpreting an animal’s footprints, bones, other remnants and the behaviors associated with them, trailing requires finding a fresh trail and following it until the animal responsible is found.

“It’s two different skill sets, and trailing builds upon the track and sign identification and interpretation,” she said.

In addition to exploring the woods behind her house with neighborhood friends, Lawrence credits her high school running experience for helping her build her physical and mental stamina. A 1989 graduate of Ledyard High School, she ran cross-country, indoor and outdoor track, and she said the year-round training helped prepare her for the rigors of wildlife tracking.

She started pursuing tracking after graduation, but it wasn’t until she met guides with CyberTracker at the 2006 International Society of Professional Trackers conference in California that she decided to go to Africa to learn more.

A few trackers from Africa attended the conference with CyberTracker's founder Louis Liebenberg, and they asked Lawrence’s group to identify five tracks during an exercise. No one in her group got all five correct, but the trackers took each track and showed what makes each track different, explaining with diagrams why a gray fox track isn’t a housecat track or a bobcat track

“By 10 people getting that track wrong, you learned 10 different species,” she said. “That really clicked with my learning style.”

Lawrence started the program in 2008 and received her track and sign specialist certification in South Africa in 2011, the second woman to do so. Last May, she received her trailing specialist certification in the Pacific Northwest, the first woman to do so. She said that trip to the rain forests in Washington State to track bears was a particularly memorable experience.

“It was just amazing,” she said. “I was on my hands and knees crawling through swamps, looking at these tunnels through vegetation that bears have gone and dragging myself through salmonberry thickets… they’re like hungry little tanks.”

Through her company Original Wisdom, Lawrence leads expeditions for students and other groups in South Africa and the U.S. She said that the courses, which range from a weekend to a few weeks, vary based on who is leading them and who is attending. An art course, for example, might include visiting famous rock art sites around South Africa.

However, all of the courses include components of tracking and ecology, and she said her favorite part was seeing how people interact with the natural world.

“They form an intimate connection with those animals, and they get to spend two to three weeks with us out on the land forming these connections,” she said. “I like it when you see that light bulb go off in people’s heads and you learn later that this person who was a major in economics has gone on to develop some policy that has helped save some off-shore island for migratory birds.”

For more information about Lawrence’s company, visit the Original Wisdom website.

a.hutchinson@theday.com