Program provides the skinny on scat
PITTSBURGH (AP) — There’s nothing like a leisurely walk in the park or an easy pedal on a bike trail on a deliciously crisp winter day.
Look up and name the maker of that large treetop nest. Consider the source of those trail-crossing tracks. And occasionally — yuck! — what animal dropped that?
Hunters, trappers and field biologists take a particular interest in animal scat. Wildlife refuse can reveal much about the depositor’s species, gender, age, health and primary food source.
Children, too, take interest particularly because of the gross factor and natural curiosity about bodily functions. In December, Jennings Environmental Education Center in Butler County applied its specialized mission with an interactive program called The Scoop on Poop.
As part of Jennings’ Nature Detective series for families with kids 6 and up, the program included indoor education and research as well as outdoor work stations where kids investigated real and artificial scat sites in Pennsylvania’s smallest state park, located near Slippery Rock.
“We had a couple discovery stations set up that included artificial scat that looks very realistic,” said environmental education specialist Brandi Miller-Parrish. “At a separate [indoor] station, we had borrowed sanitized otter scat from Ohiopyle [State Park] and the kids used handheld iPad microscopes to look at the contents of the scat — fish scales, exoskeletons. There was not much fecal matter left.”
The young nature detectives — all girls — got to examine animals’ pelts, skulls and pictures, then ventured outside to check out seven scat sites. Using an ID chart and their newly acquired skills, they tried to identify the animals that had left those droppings.
Miller-Parrish said some of the stations had been contrived by Jennings staff. The black bear station had big rocks that appeared to have been flipped in search of food, claw marks on logs, hair clumps in trees and a big artificial dung pile. Other sites were totally natural.
“We didn’t have to do much. The animals did it for us,” she said. “The deer station was in a perfect location where they walk through regularly.”
A hunter and trapper for some 60 years, Albert Trosser said examining tracks, scrapes, rubs, feathers and other sign is a routine part of scouting. But more information, he said, is often revealed at scat sites.
“Watch animals, even pets,” he said. “When they cross another animal’s tracks, they’ll usually sniff it. But when they come up on bodily functions they get very interested.
“They stop and sniff, some might want to roll in it, and they want to leave their own mark over it. That’s because it’s not just feces and urine that animals leave behind. Animals communicate through those scents.”
Scat sites often include urine as well as tracks, ground scrapes or attempts to bury the droppings. Even with laboratory tools, humans can’t sniff out most of the saliva, mucus, pheromones, male and female releases, glandular secretions, and other chemical communication signals exchanged by animals.
But Trosser said physical examination of the sites can show an experienced trapper the proximity of a furbearer and how often it frequents a particular area.
Bobcat droppings look like those of a large house cat but often appear as soft and gray as the rabbits it has eaten. Fox excrement is generally as elusive as the animal that dropped it. When found it can look like that of any domestic dog but is visibly filled with hair and bone, and may be prominently displayed on a large rock or log.
Such scat may have been a territorial marker left by a red fox for encroaching coyotes. It surely didn’t come from a gray fox, which is more likely to run fast and far at the first sniff of coyotes.
Black bears drop large clumps that can reveal undigested remnants of the berries, grasses, fish, small mammals, carrion or trash that the opportunistic omnivore has eaten.
Wild turkey hunters look for thin, black, cylindrical, worm-like droppings. Small blunt-ended tubes of about 1 1/2 inches found in spring and early summer were left by a young polt. Larger scat is left by a gobbler, and if it’s curved like a cheese curl, it probably came from a hen.
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