Saturday, September 25, 2010

Animal Tracking: Black Bear Scat?

While me and JuJu the donkey were on one of our walks I came upon this scat (poop) in the gravel road. I knew right away it was not raccoon scat, bird scat, or deer scat because of the shape...
it had some round berries in it and didn't look hairy so I felt perplexed as to whether it might be coyote scat either.
Fox? A bit of black bear poop? Opossum?
Following scat descriptions, I know that canine's have poop that gets pointy on the ends and bobcats have a tubular shape too - deer and rabbit poop comes out in pellets (rabbit's having a more dry, flat, & separated look, deer being a bigger wet pile of pellets), wild turkey scat looks like a big bird poop with the white mixed in. Raccoon's look like alot of lil' cylinder tubes of poop, and opossums are kinda like a coyote poop that has bumps strung together....
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This left me with one choice... a choice I smelled about 50 feet down the road....
A Black BEAR!
Further down the way I smelled a strong odor, one that was like skunky urine. I immediately knew it was a bear, I assume from some deep biological part of my brain that carries primitive instincts cause I have not seen a bear urinate & then sniffed it after. It's something you just know when it blows into your nose. A bear smells like no other animal and it's generally skunky stinky dread locked dirty pungent aroma can't be missed.
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Now I realize, the bear has been hanging all around my cabin, this poop with these berries in it are everywhere in the woods.
XOxoxo