You can only write and talk about animals for so long without touching on the topic of poop. While it’s not an immediately attractive topic, it’s a reality of how animals exist in natural and human-made spaces; just ask any dog owner! For the nature-curious, animal poop can be a surprisingly useful form of what we call “tracks and sign”, giving us evidence of what animals are around and what they might be up to. While I don’t tend to spend a lot of time on this rather smelly subject, I have learned from colleagues, friends, and mentors who are mammal experts just how useful a skill it can be to notice and study animal poo. While it might get you more weird looks than birdwatching, taking a moment to scrutinize an animal dropping you come across in a park or in your back yard can help you gather important information. Beyond that, it’s a cool nature-knowledge flex to show your friends!
Read More: 10 Signs of Wildlife to Look for in Nature
As part of Gulo in Nature’s continuing series of Beginner Naturalist Tips, let’s (metaphorically!) dive into wild animal poop and how it can help you learn about and understand the natural world.
Why is identifying wildlife poop useful?
For those readers who are understandably skeptical, let’s take a moment to think about why looking at poop is a good skill for naturalists. Pooping is an essential part of animal metabolism, the ongoing process by which animals take in food, digest it, and continue their living functions. In other words, it’s as natural to all animals as breathing or eating, and it’s a way of ridding the body of unwanted materials or potentially harmful waste products. Since poop can also contain leftover body chemicals like hormones, the chemical makeup of poop can tell us a lot about an animal. For example, whether it was male or female, sick, pregnant, or so-on. Many mammals also have scent glands around their rear-ends, which means that additional smell-signals can be deposited on their poop.
Read More: What Walks This Way: Discovering the Wildlife Around Us Through Their Tracks and Signs
All this means that any animal poop you come across contains a lot of information about the animal it came from (i.e., the pooper). With a quick glance, or (for the brave!) a few pokes with a stick, you can learn a bunch about what animals are in your area. Depending on what you find, an animal dropping could tell you:
- What kind of animal left it there
- How long ago the animal came by
- What it’s been eating
All this is particularly important because many animals don’t want to be seen. While plants have nowhere to go and bugs are often active and easy to find if you know where to look, mammals tend to be stealthy or only active at dawn, dusk, or night, when it might not be safe or easy to look for them. Birdwatching is relatively simple and straightforward, but mammal-watching can be a challenging task! However, looking out for mammal sign like poop can give you a window into who’s around and what they’re snacking on, opening up another angle of natural history knowledge.
What Poop Can Tell You
- Many animals, especially mammals, are hard to see in the wild, but their poop can be easier to find
- Poop contains clues on an animal’s diet
- Poop can also tell you how recently an animal was around
Wildlife Poop in Research
Scientists can go even further in learning from poop, using laboratory chemical and genetic techniques to literally extract more detailed information. Picking up on chemical cues that other animals might be able to smell, scientists can test for concentrations of hormones to check on an animal’s health, see how stressed they are, or whether they’re looking to mate. Using genetic techniques, they can also identify individuals and keep track of where they spend their time.
Read More: 18 Awesome Facts about Tigers
For rare or secretive animals like big cats and other top predators, poop is an extremely important data source for research. Scientists like the staff at the conservation dog non-profit K9Conservationists will even use dogs to find animal poop and help support studies in wildlife conservation!
Talk like a Naturalist – Useful Poo Lingo
Obviously, talking about poop all the time can sound a little unprofessional. Just like with the Nature Vocabulary you’ll come across in our biweekly Gulo in Nature Newsletter, there are some great, nerdy words you can use to describe wildlife poop that you may encounter in the outdoors. Let’s learn some basic lingo to help you get more info from any you might come across.
First off, naturalists use the term scat for animal poop, and you’ll come across that word often in both the scientific literature and field guides and other nature books. It’s a bit less colorful and evocative than other words for poo, which might be a good thing. Naturalists typically start with the length and diameter of a sample of scat, to get an idea of its approximate size.
Other terms might describe the shape of scat, including:
- Tubular – tube shaped
- Pellet – small, rounded
- Segmented – consisting of multiple connected parts
- Plop – piled up scat without a consistent shape or solid form
- Tapered – getting narrower at one end
- Weathering – the degree to which a scat is dried up or degraded by rainfall or insects
Areas where animals regularly poop, usually as part of their daily rounds, are called latrines.
Where to find scat
Although at first you might think that finding wildlife scat would be like searching for a needle in a haystack, it’s surprisingly easy to do. If you’re out looking to find scat in an outdoor space, some key aspects of animal behavior can make this very simple.
First, the tendency of many animals to have latrines where they poop most of the time means that if you found a scat in a place once, you’ll probably see it there again. This also means that scat will typically be concentrated in space, with the same animal’s droppings accumulated over different days.
Second, as you read earlier, many mammals use their scat to communicate things about themselves, for example marking territories. As part of this communication, some mammals will place their scat on top of, or next to, another animal’s scat. This can be an individual of the same species, or a different one. While this can make it easier to find a lot of interesting scat, it adds the additional complication that one pile of scat might belong to multiple poopers, and you’d need to pay close attention to sleuth that out.
In the same vein, mammals looking to make a point with their scat will place it in places that others are likely to find it or smell it. Foxes, for instance, typically poop on top of rocks or other elevated, prominent objects, making an improvised pedestal to get their scat noticed. This can also help the smell of the scat carry on the wind! Other predators have a habit of leaving scat along paths or in open, exposed areas, where other travelling animals are likely to come across them. In my experience, this means I often come across scat on a hike without even looking for it! In fact, you’re typically more likely to find scat by sticking to a trail than wandering off it.
Like other forms of animal sign, scat is much easier to find during the winter, when plant cover is lower and where, in colder regions, snow will make it contrast strongly with the ground.
Key things to look for when identifying scat
Location – Where did you find the scat? The type of habitat an animal is using can go a long way in figuring out the culprit. Some animals also have particular types of habitats that they prefer to use for latrines. For example, otters and minks will often defecate near the shore of a river, or on a fallen log or rock at the river’s edge.
Read More: How to Describe Natural Habitats like a Naturalist
Contents – Can you see anything inside the scat? Hard-to-digest materials like seeds, bones, hair or fur, or pieces of grass can be very informative as to what the animal ate. Certain animals are more likely to eat certain foods at certain times of year. Combined with the general shape of the scat, the contents can provide great evidence. Small, intact bones might suggest a predator that eats rodents or other small animals, while fragments or lots of hair might suggest taking larger prey.
A magnifying glass can be extremely handy in helping identify scat contents. While I usually use mine for bugs and plants, it has helped me spot seeds or hairs in animal dung.
Read more: How to use a magnifying glass
Shape – How is the scat formed? Can you use any of the vocabulary words above to describe it? Ungulates (hoofed animals) like deer will typically have their scat in pellets. Meanwhile, domestic cattle and bears tend to leave a plop.
Color – Is the scat uniform in color? Is it dark or light? Scat from lizards and birds tend to have white components, which are uric acid deposited along with the solid waste of the poop. In lizards, this will look like a white cap on top of the scat, while with birds it will typically be a liquid or pasty consistency.
Read More: Why is Bird Poop White?
Weathering and Nearby Scat – Does the scat look old or fresh? Is there similar scat nearby? Is that scat fresher or older? Lots of similar scat of different ages could imply that you’ve found a latrine. Since only some animals use latrines, this can also help narrow it down.
Scat ID Mobile Apps
Smartphone and mobile apps have made some major strides in helping people learn about the outdoors. An exciting recent development leveraging Artificial Intelligence and image recognition has led to apps that can identify (or attempt to identify) animals based on their scat. While the technology for these was developed to help people monitor the health of their dogs and cats through images of their poop, they are increasingly useful tools for nature-lovers.
Read More: Top Outdoor Apps for Beginning Naturalists
Here are a couple of the leading apps for identifying scat:
WhoPoo – A community-based wildlife scat identifier with structured menus for filtering through potential suspects.
Download: App Store or Google Play
Animal Scat Identifier – Centered around North America and Europe, this similarly AI-powered ID app allows users to save observations and compile their sightings, has useful offline functionality for remote use, and has a database of reference images to study from.
Download: App Store or Google Play
Many university extension agencies and government wildlife departments also offer field guides and dichotomous keys to help you identify scat that you come across. For example, the State of Michigan’s Department of Natural Resources has a step-by-step guide that I’ve used with some success even in Georgia.
Key Takeaways: Identifying Wildlife Scat
- Wildlife poop, or scat, is often the best option for learning about elusive or night-active mammals in an outdoor space
- The shape, appearance, content and location of scat can tell you a lot about the animal that produced it
- Many mammals deliberately place their scat to be visible or detectable to other animals, so it can be remarkably easy to find!
- The number of resources to identify scat in the outdoors is increasing. Always snap a photo so you can look it up later!
Thanks for Reading!
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