2010 - The Year in Scat

"What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet."

The same can be said for poop in a sense. Call it scat, droppings, excrement, dung, feces, manure, guano. It’s still poop. Calling it sweet might be a stretch.

I’m fascinated by animal scat. Absent of the animal, it tells us who passed by, when they passed by and what they ate. It comes in many telling shapes and sizes and sometimes it’s downright artistic. Here are my favorites in descending order.

10) The armadillo is my holy grail of scat – I know they poop. I’ve just never found any.

9) Most of the time I can make an educated guess. Sometimes it remains a mystery. This large pile was found just north of the Everglades. Coarse black hairs suggest a feral pig was eaten. I’m thinking Florida Panther.

8) Scat names can be species specific. If it came from a bat it’s called guano. In most parts of North America it’s easy to differentiate from rodent droppings of the same size. Bats eat insects with chitinous exoskeletons which do not get completely digested when passed in droppings. Under a bright flashlight the insect pieces sparkle.

7) American Black Bears range all throughout North America and as omnivores, have the luxury of feasting on whatever is on the outdoor buffet. A fresh crop of acorns from the Florida oaks have helped fatten up the bears for winter. A large pile of poop adorned with bits of acorn is the tell tail sign.

6) Turkeys enjoy a wide range of foods as well, including acorns and insects. This lovely arrangement of comma shaped droppings has evidence of an abundance of plant matter.

5) Domestic and wild cats have the good grace to cover up their scats with varying results. This bobcat scrapped some grass together to cover a bone and fur amalgam of poop.

4) Manatees are herbivores that feed on up to 100 lbs of vegetation a day. They’re gassy and they poop a lot. Manatees are rare and endangered and the sea is their toilet bowl. Finding a Manatee scat is a treasure.

3) Insects poop too as evidenced by the droppings from this juvenile Eastern Lubber grasshopper.

2) I believe Shakespeare was referring to otter poop when he noted “all that glitters is not gold”. Otters are from the mustelid family and have droppings that range from sweet smelling to rotten fish. They feast primarily on fish and their scat is uniquely filled with sparkling, undigested fish scales.

1) What do you get when you mix American Beauty Berry with a Raccoon? Art. You’re welcome. Happy New Year. 

Armadillo Poop

Do you have any idea what Armadillo poop looks like? Depending on the species, the age, the size and even the gender of an animal - scat can be varied but there are certain ways to identify who pooped and I'm fairly good at it, but I've never considered Armadillo poop.

A night hike in the western cypress swamps of the Everglades turned up a few interesting piles on Saturday night and a walk across one of the levees that stretches into the Everglades on the east coast from Miami on Monday revealed a few more droppings. Coyotes are making their way into southern Florida and their scat can be identified by the relatively large size of the poop.

This one was about 4 inches long and full of hair and bones. They usually leave it right in the middle of the trail for others to find. Marked with their unique scent - it's essentially a coyote's e-mail - butt mail as it were. That's how they communicate with other coyotes. There are about 400 or so Black Bears in the Big Cypress area of the Everglades (SW corner). They do poop in the woods but also on the trails like this massive pile we found while hiking at night. It probably could have filled my baseball hat. It was full of saw palmetto berries and other vegetation which makes up a good portion of their omnivorous diet.

Otter poop is so unique it gets its own name. They call it spraint and it has a very musky odor. I actually got down on hands and knees to take a whiff, which I don't think is as odd as someone coming up with a word for otter poop. The other easy identifier is the circular bits in the poop. Fish scales. Otters eat crabs and fish for the most part but the fish scales are not digested and get left behind. Fantastic. Another easy way to identify scat is if you actually see it coming out of the animal. Had the Raccoon not just pooped, I might have startled it enough to do so. I was alone on this walk so there is no need to admit that the startled raccoon leaping off the levee into the sawgrass caused any such reaction in me.

This Raccoon scat is full of palmetto and other berries. Nowhere near as much in the pile as the Bear but just as ornate and textured. And then there is the Nine-banded Armadillo. First let me point out that you should pronounce it Arm-uh-dee-yo. Few say it right if you ask me. Next time you go to a Mexican restaurant ask for tor-till-uh chips. You wouldn't. You'd say tor-tee-ya. So say Arm-uh-dee-ya. But I digress.
My hike brought me one and a half miles from pavement where I was the only human being within 3 square miles. Staring down at my GPS - I ambled along and nearly kicked this Armadillo. They have terrible eye sight, horrible hearing and a fairly good sense of smell. When this one was within 2 feet of me - it sniffed the air, snorted and popped a foot in the air before darting off into the scrub. Unlike other Armadillos - the Nine-banded flees as opposed to curling up into a ball.

It surprised me to see it out here. They eat grubs, ants and other insects but this area seemed too desolate of a landscape for the Armadillo to find enough food and yet here it was. I knew there were raccoons and otters out here. I saw their scat. But I hadn't seen any signs of Armadillos and I wondered - "What does Armadillo poop look like?"