Scat Finding Mission

Yesterday evening I got together with a few other tracker types at Discovery Park - one of the large city parks in the Seattle area. To my knowledge, there aren't many places in the city that are good for finding animal tracks. Not many big stretches of sand or mud, and the ones there are often are covered in people and dog tracks. So it seems like a good idea to practice sign tracking in the city.

The other folks who came knew the park much better than I did. So when I suggested it might be fun to find some weasel scat we went down to the north beach where there have been weasels seen. Plus there are otters that hang out there a lot.

It took us a little while to get down there, but when we did it didn't take us long to find a mystery. We walked along between the vegetation and the water (an area mostly covered in large breakwater rocks) and in some grass along the edge of the bushes found some scat. It was very soft, probably about a half inch diameter, but twisted on top of itself a bit. The contents were mostly smooth, dark and with the occasional seed, but not chock full of seeds like scats often get when an animal has been eating predominantly berries. It was close to a trail into the brush and also next to an opening into what appeared to be a vole tunnel.

It seems as though our evening was characterized by scat mysteries. Later we spent some time discussing whether otter eat blackberries. There is otter scat in the rocks all along the beach there, mostly it is filled with crunched up crustacean shells and has a particular strong fishy odor. But we found some blackberry filled scat that seemed similarly placed and shaped to the otter scat. I've learned that most animals will eat fruit when it is available, but I've never heard specifically about otters doing so. Raccoon is the other likely candidate as there are many in that area and the characteristics of the scat would also make sense for them.

Finally, as the light was getting dimmer we found a small scat (around 1/4 inch across and close to an inch long) on the trail. It was dark and mostly filled with insect parts though there were also a few large seeds (presumably blackberry). While most of the scat was dark there did appear to be some white on an end and we decided that this scat was probably from a flicker.

I think if we do something like that again it might be fun to comb through the woods and see what we find there.