Do you know how to identify animal scat?  Here are 3 tips to help you figure out what kind of animal that scat you found while hiking may have come from.

There are two good ways to tell if an animal is an area without seeing the actual animal – scat and animal tracks.  Anytime that you and your family go exploring in the great outdoors you may come across some animal scat.  Finding animal scat is a great way to know there are animals in an area.  However, if you can’t identify that scat you have no idea what animals are around.  Here are three tips to help you narrow down what type of animal that scat may have come from.

3 Tips To Help Identify Animal Scat

Look at the general shape of the scat.  Animal scat or poop comes in a few general shapes.  The most obvious ones that are easy to tell apart are tubular, pellets, or plop like?

Look at the size of scat.  Take a look at the scat and make an estimate as to how large it is.  About how many inches long is the scat?

Different animals have different size scat.  For example, both a coyote and mouse have tubular scat, but a mouse’s is much smaller in size.

What is in the scat?  Do you see any hair?  Berries?  Something else?  What an animal eats often comes through in the scat.

For example, carnivores eat meat, which sometimes includes the hair or fur of animals and the scat of carnivores may include that hair or fur.

Omnivores, such as bears eat berries and their scat may show some berries.

These Tips Will Help You Identify Animal Scat

Following these steps will help you narrow down your search to a few possible animals.  You may not be able to figure out the exact animal that it is from, but with careful observation you should be able to get a better idea of what animals are in an area based on the kinds of scat you see.

General Shape of Scat For Different Kinds of Eaters

Herbivores = pellets

Carnivores = tubular with hair in it

Omnivores = tubular or plops with hair or berries in it

Pellets – Different animals have different size of pellets.  The following animals have pellets: deer, Elk, Moose, Mountain goats, Bighorn sheep, and rabbits.

Plops – This scat may come from Bears and comes in a variety of shapes and sizes, but the basic idea is that it looks like a big plop.

Tubular Large – Larger scat comes from larger animals, such as canines (coyotes, wolves, dogs), and felines (cougars or other cats).

Tubular Small – This small scat comes from small animals, such as rodents (mice, chipmunks, and squirrels).