Most of what a good guide finds, he finds by looking down. Here is some of what he is reading.
New guests watch the horizon. Guides watch the road. By day three most guests have noticed this and started asking why.
Tracks tell you time, not just species
A lion print in soft dust is obvious. What matters is its edges. Sharp, crisp edges with fine detail mean recent — an hour, maybe two. Softened edges, wind-blown sand collecting in the pad marks, insects having walked across it: older, probably yesterday.
Your guide is not asking "was there a lion here". He is asking "was there a lion here this morning", which is a completely different question with a completely different answer about where to drive next.
Direction and gait
Prints show which way the animal was going, and whether it was walking, trotting or running. A pride walking in single file at dawn is heading somewhere specific — usually water or shade. A running print set means something happened.
Cats also register: the hind foot lands almost exactly in the print of the front. When that pattern breaks, the animal was doing something other than travelling.
Dung is a calendar
Unglamorous and extremely informative. Elephant dung tells you what it has eaten and roughly when it passed. Fresh is dark, moist and warm; a day old is pale and dry with beetles already working it. Rhino leave middens in the same places repeatedly, which is territorial signalling and useful to anyone tracking them.
Alarm calls do half the work
This is the one guests can learn in a week. Baboons have a specific bark for leopard that is different from their general noise. Vervets are similar. Impala snort and stamp and all face one direction — and that direction is where the predator is.
Francolins scream, guineafowl scatter, and a lone go-away bird will follow a leopard through the canopy complaining loudly the entire way.
When your guide suddenly stops the engine and puts his head out of the window, he is listening for exactly this. Stop talking.
Vultures, at three levels
Birds circling high and wide are searching. Birds descending in a tight spiral have found something. Birds already on the ground mean the kill is old and the cats have probably gone — though not always, and a lion asleep next to a carcass is a common sighting.
What to do with this
Ask. Guides are asked the same six questions every week and most of them light up when someone asks a seventh. Point at a print and ask what it is and how old. By the end of a week you will be seeing about a third of what your guide sees, which is roughly three times what you saw on day one.
