Animal Poopie Doobles

We're going to talk about animal poop. Go ahead, say it, "Oooooooooooooooooo!" I know, I know. But animals do have to make poopie doobles. The formal name for poopie doobles is "scat." Animal scat can tell scientists many, many things about what is going on in a particular environment.

While on my hike in Irvine Regional Park, I found all of this scat, and boy was I happy. HAPPY?? Happy about seeing poop??? That's right. Let me explain. Animal scat is evidence or proof that an animal lives in that area. Animal evidence can be many things. Paw prints or tracks, hair, scat shed snake skin, feathers, or even crushed beds of grass can all be thought of as animal evidence.

Let's look at the top picture. At first I thought this might have been left by a rabbit. But rabbit scat is perfectly round and smaller. So, then I knew it must be a deer. That means that deer still live in this park! Ah-sum! Later on, I saw deer hoof prints in the mud. So the scat and the prints prove that deer still live in Irvine Park, even though there are shopping centers within a mile.

In the next picture, there is scat that entirely different than deer scat. This is raccoon scat. Now I know that raccoons still live in Irvine Park. In fact, raccoons live in my back yard. They come to eat the fallen fruit from my fruit trees. One night, when I was in my living room with friends, I saw a fuzzy shape out of the corner of my eye outside the sliding glass door. At first I was scared! But then I saw that it was a raccoon. It was a cute "teenager," larger than a baby, but not quite an adult and I named him Rocky. I have seen Rocky a couple of times since then.

Examine the third picture. What do you see in the scat? Those are red seeds! This animal ate some kind of fruit that had red seeds. As we have said before, plants need animals and animals need plants. The animal needed this plant for food, and the plant needed for the animal to spread the seeds around. Now brace yourself, there was fur in the scat. What could that mean? Yes, this animal ate another animal. EXTREME ooooh ick, I know. But why is it a good thing that there is fur in the scat. It means that this animal probably ate a rat or a mouse. What would happen if this animal did not eat the rat? Correct, there would be a jillion rats running around, taking over the park. So, animals eat other animals, and this keeps nature in balance. So, we know that this animal ate fruit and another animal. That means it is an "omnivore." An omnivore eats plants and animals. I'm pretty sure that this omnivore scat came from a coyote. So we have proof that coyotes are here (and also in my neighborhood) keeping nature in balance.

Finally, I have a job for YOU. I want you to find out what kind of scat this is in the last picture. I am thinking that it is Mountain Lion scat!! It was very, VERY BIG. You can tell how BIG it is by comparing it with those eucalyptus leaves in the photo. It was bigger than coyote scat and much different than horsey scat. So, if you find out what animal made this, let me know. Before Orange County became so populated with people, it was home to many, many Mountain Lions roaming free. One Mountain Lion needs about a hundred square miles of space in order to find enough food to survive. Because humans build more and more houses in southern California, the Mountain Lion has less and less land. What do you think that does to the number of Mountain Lions living here? Correct, it goes down. There are very, very few Mountain Lions left in Orange County. It is extremely rare that a human will even see a Mountain Lion in Orange County. So be a detective. Find out if this is evidence that a rare Mountain Lion has traveled through this area.

Did you find this useful? If so, you can send a "tip" to my PAYPAL.COM account. My email address is kathomatho@yahoo.com. I will donate 10% of your tip to The Orange County Zoo.