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Brentwood Press - BrentwoodPress_10.03.08 - Index

14A | BRENTWOODPRESS.COM OUTDOORS OCTOBER 3, 2008
Inside scoop on critter poop
Hit the trail often enough and you
see things that don’t want to be seen. Last
fall at Black Diamond Mines, a grey fox
trotted across the Corcoran Mine Trail
about 20 yards in front of me – and in no
particular hurry, since I was busy fumbling
TAKE IT
OUTSIDE
GER
ERICKSON
for my camera. For a
precious minute in the
pale light of dawn offtrail
at Round Valley
this spring I shared
a steep hillside with
a bobcat that glided
past me surprised but
unimpressed by my
existence. And on a
winter morning at
Los Vaqueros three
years ago, a pack of
four coyotes in single fi le loped across the
Vista Grande Trail not 30 yards from my
respectful stare.
The fox, bobcat, the coyotes – all well
camoufl aged, all eager to avoid contact
with homo sapiens. I’m lucky to have
stolen such close encounters. The irony is
that in a charmingly repugnant sense, I see
those creatures every time I go hiking. My
secret? I just look down. There on the trail
is the signature of their presence. No, it’s
not footprints – it’s feces.
In a recent visit to the Los Vaqueros
Watershed Interpretive Center, naturalist
John Mottashed of the Livermore Area
Recreation Park District introduced 11
explorers in excrement to the wonderful
world of “scat.” And we’re not talking
improvisational stylings of Ella Fitzgerald
or Mel Torme. We’re talking animal poop.
The scat that most of us encounter in
our manicured ’burbs gets scooped into
a plastic bag and plopped into the trash.
Out in the wild, those droppings become
a window into the world of the creature
that dropped them. “By looking at scat,
opening it up and examining what’s inside,
we can fi gure out what animal left it,
what its diet is – all sorts of things,” said
Mottashed, who brought stool samples
of a mountain lion, bobcat and coyote,
among others – all preserved in krylon and
sealed up nice and tight in display bottles.
Spotting scat is one thing; identifying
the creature that left it behind is another.
“It takes years of experience to get good at
it,” said Mottashed, adding that even his
accomplished tracker friends sometimes
get stumped. For example, the scat of two
creatures similar in size and from the same
zoological family – say, a mature bobcat
and a young mountain lion, both felines
– can be hard to tell apart.
But some rules of thumb are pretty
reliable. Canines such as coyotes leave more
tubular and segmented scat than felines,
whose leavings tend to be fi nely tapered at
one end. Like your family feline, bobcats
and mountain lions sometimes bury their
scat. Scratch marks on the ground in the
vicinity of the rectal event are a good sign
that a cat has been out and about. Mountain
lions have also been known to leave
their scat on top of bobcat and coyote scat
as a way of asserting territorial superiority.
Photos by Ger Erickson
On the Kellogg Creek Trail at Los Vaqueros, above, naturalist John
Mottashed examines coyote scat spotted by the sharp eye of Bethel Island
resident Ryan Waller, right. The claw of a creature that woke up on the
wrong side of the food chain protrudes from a chunk of coyote scat, inset,
characterized by its segmented structure and profusion of undigested fur.
In three to fi ve days, scat will dry up
and turn whitish, a helpful development
for waste watchers confounded by fresh
scat’s resemblance to sticks and chucks of
dirt. It didn’t take our band of turd nerds
long to locate a spot where a coyote had
evidently shot some craps. Mottashed
donned a pair of latex gloves, picked up the
scat and pointed out the furry remains of
the small and hapless mammal the coyote
had donated for our enlightenment. He
broke open the scat and showed us a tiny
claw imbedded in the center, testimony to
the coyote’s indifference to cuisine with an
overly al dente texture.
One of the dos and don’ts of animal
doo-doo pertains to raccoon scat, in
which the roundworm parasite is often
found. That parasite, if ingested, can be
fatal. “That’s why, even though I wear
these gloves when I’m handling scat,” said
Mottashed, “I try not to handle raccoon
scat at all.” One of the specimens the group
found on the trail contained some material
Mottashed identifi ed as Himalayan
blackberries. Since the creature in question
might have been a raccoon, we admired
from afar.
Although the identity of a few scat
samples eluded us, the trail revealed a
quantity and variety to delight the most
passionate devotee of dung. The bad news:
lots of stopping and starting along the
trail. The good news: in fecal matters, it’s
wise to maintain a slow pace. When on
poop patrol, the last thing you want to
hear from the guy in charge is “Step on it!”