Opinion: The lighter side of poop

My wife was watching a couple of kids the other day and they’re right around age 2, potty trained a few months now, at least when they feel like it.

The little boy came out of the bathroom the other day and said, “Hey Chris, come take a look at my big poop.”

I smiled and politely declined. My wife broke up laughing. I’ve spent the better part of my life looking at big poops and little poops, too. Started out with cow poop at the farm, which pretty much coated everything, including me.

Once on a dare I jumped off the hay wagon while feeding the heifers and the mud and poop was so deep in the pasture it sucked off my boots and I walked around in my socks.

I tried washing them out before I went into the house, but my grandma figured out pretty quick something had gone awry.

Why adults buy kids white socks is beyond me.

Once I started pursuing game identifying poop became a bigger deal. Finding fox and coyote

poop was always a big deal and you could tell what the raccoons had been eating by their poop.

(Sweet corn is a raccoon favorite, by the way, and fox eat more grasshoppers than you think.) Moving West, poop is just as big of a deal. Of course there’s bear poop, both black and grizzly. Generally the grizzly bear poop is bigger. In the spring it’s full of hair and grasses as they eat carrion if they can find it and the new sprouts of countless plants.

When berry season rolls around some poops look like huckleberry pie without the crust.

Wolf poop is always interesting, full of hair and bones. It typically smells horrid and one time I got the bright idea of picking up some lion poop with my mittens and couldn’t get the smell out until I washed them — twice.

Birds poop, too, of course and you can find roosting areas by looking for the white poop streaks.

I once went out in the field with a biologists studying elk, deer and aspens and she said there

was a formula for figuring out how long the elk had been in an area by the decomposition rate of their poop — or something like that.

Of course, entire scientific papers have been written about poop. A quick search of the web came up with this one: “Diet of North Dakota Elk Determined from Rumen and Fecal Analyses.”

Turns out North Dakota elk like corn.

My favorite poops aren’t poops at all, but vomit. The pellets of owls — regurgitated after an owl kills and eats something— are full of little bones.

If you know the anatomy of their prey, you can figure out exactly what they’re eating.

What fun.

Chris Peterson is the editor of the Hungry Horse News.