Animals
Whose droppings are these?
Droppings outlast tracks, survive rain, and tell you what the animal has been eating — which is often more diagnostic than any footprint. Filter by shape first, then size, then what you can see in it. Pellets, tapered tubes and blunt tubes divide the whole list almost cleanly into herbivores, carnivores and omnivores.
Do not handle droppings with bare hands. Raccoon scat can carry Baylisascaris roundworm eggs that survive years in soil and cause permanent neurological damage; rodent droppings can carry hantavirus, which is inhaled from dust. Wear gloves, wet the material down before disturbing it, use a mask for dry rodent droppings in enclosed spaces, and never sweep or vacuum them dry.
Narrow it down
Showing all 30 animals
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White-tailed deer
Small oval pellets, pointed at one end and dimpled at the other, dropped in a loose scattered heap. On spring grass the same animal produces a soft clumped mass instead — diet changes the shape completely.
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Rabbit and hare
Perfectly round, slightly flattened, dry and fibrous, breaking apart into sawdust between your fingers — and left in large scattered quantities on a lawn overnight.
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Elk
Deer pellets scaled up by half, usually in a big consolidated pile rather than a scatter. On green summer forage they merge into cow-like patties.
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Moose
Very large barrel-shaped pellets, coarse with visible twig fibre in winter, dropped in a heap so big it is hard to mistake for anything else at the size.
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Eastern cottontail droppings in a lawn
The classic overnight scatter of small dry brown spheres on short grass, concentrated near shrub cover where the animal feels safe enough to sit.
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Coyote
A rope of hair and bone fragments twisted to a fine point at one end, deposited deliberately in the middle of a trail or on a rock as a territorial marker. In late summer it may be entirely berry skins and seeds.
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Red fox
A slimmer coyote scat, sharply twisted at one end and stuffed with hair and beetle wing cases, placed prominently on a molehill, tussock, wall or garden bench — foxes advertise.
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Gray wolf
Coyote scat at a size that stops you: as thick as a broom handle, packed almost entirely with coarse hair and splintered bone, and left in the middle of a road or trail.
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Domestic dog
Smooth, uniform, blunt at both ends, with no hair, bone or seed in it — because commercial food contains none. This uniformity is the single most reliable way to rule out every wild canid.
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Domestic cat
Short blunt segments, strongly and distinctively foul-smelling, usually half-buried with scratched-up soil around it in a dry bed or freshly dug border.
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Bobcat
Segmented like a house cat's but much larger, full of rodent hair, often lightly covered with scraped debris at the edge of a trail or on a log.
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Mountain lion
Handle with careBig segmented cat scat, dense with deer hair and bone chips, frequently scraped over with a pile of soil and litter a foot across. The scrape is more diagnostic than the scat.
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Black bear
Enormous, and almost always vegetarian in appearance: a loose mass of berry skins, seeds, acorn shell and grass. In autumn it can be a solid purple mass of nothing but berries.
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Raccoon
Can injure youBlunt-ended tubes packed with undigested berry seeds and crayfish or insect fragments, deposited at a communal latrine — the base of a tree, a roof valley, a woodpile, a deck rail, used night after night.
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Striped skunk
Small blunt tubes glittering with beetle and grasshopper parts, often on a lawn or deck near a shallow cone-shaped digging where the animal went after grubs.
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Virginia opossum
Smooth-sided, frequently curled or bent into a comma, with a whitish mould bloom developing quickly. Contents are mixed and rarely dominated by any one item.
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River otter
A loose, tarry, unmistakably fishy mass of scales, crayfish shell and small bones, left on a prominent rock or bank rollover site — otters use the same haul-outs repeatedly and flatten the vegetation.
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American mink
A thin twisted rope with a strong musky smell, containing fish scale, crayfish and rodent hair, left on a rock or a log by the water's edge.
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Beaver
Compressed balls of coarse sawdust-like wood fibre, almost always deposited in the water and so rarely found — which is itself informative. Look for gnawed stumps rather than droppings.
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Muskrat
Small dark plant-fibre pellets deposited on top of a log, rock or floating platform in the water, often in a neat used-and-reused pile.
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Porcupine
Curved, comma-shaped pellets of coarse woody fibre, sometimes strung together like beads, piled deeply beneath a den tree or rock overhang.
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Groundhog
Rarely seen above ground at all — groundhogs use an underground latrine chamber. Droppings on the surface near a burrow are the exception rather than the rule, which distinguishes the burrow from a rabbit or fox den.
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Gray squirrel
Small barrel-shaped pellets with rounded rather than pointed ends, scattered along beams, deck rails and attic joists rather than in a pile.
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Norway rat
Handle with careDark spindle-shaped droppings with blunt ends, 20 to 50 of them along a consistent run — under a sink, along a wall base, behind stored feed. Rats reuse a route every night, so the droppings form a line.
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House mouse
Handle with careRice-grain-sized black droppings pointed at both ends, scattered widely rather than piled, appearing in drawers, cupboards and along skirting. A mouse produces 50 to 75 a day, so quantity builds fast.
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Bat
Handle with careMouse-sized but it crumbles to a glittering dust of insect wings and exoskeleton when crushed with a stick, because bats eat nothing else. It also accumulates in a single heap below the roost rather than scattering.
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Canada goose
Green cylindrical cigars of compressed grass with a white cap of urate at one end, deposited in industrial quantities on short mown grass beside open water.
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Wild turkey
Sex is readable from the shape: males leave a straight or J-shaped stick, females a spiral or popcorn-like clump. Both carry a white urate cap.
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Snake
A dark semi-liquid smear with a distinct chalky white cap of urate, often containing hair and small bones. The white portion is the giveaway — mammals do not produce it, birds and reptiles do.
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Domestic cattle and horses
Cattle produce a flat splattered pat; horses produce a loose cluster of large fibrous balls with visible undigested hay and grain. Both are far larger than any wild animal on this list except a moose or a bear.
Nothing in this key matches every filter at once. That usually means one observation is off — a colour read in shade, or a size guessed rather than measured. Clear the filter you are least sure about and look again.
Shape sorts the diets
Scat shape is not arbitrary. It follows from what the animal eats and how its gut handles it, which is why shape alone is more diagnostic than size.
- Pellets come from bulk fibre fermented slowly: deer, elk, moose, rabbits, muskrat, porcupine. The gut extracts water aggressively and the residue leaves as discrete dry units.
- Tapered twisted tubes come from hair. Canids and mustelids swallow their prey with the coat on, and the fur binds the mass into a rope that twists to a point as it leaves. If you find a twist, you have found a meat eater.
- Blunt-ended tubes come from mixed omnivorous diets with no binding fibre: raccoon, skunk, opossum, and dogs on commercial food.
- Segments are a cat signature — house cat, bobcat, mountain lion — and the segmentation persists across the whole size range.
- Loose masses mean either very soft forage (deer in spring grass, elk in summer) or a fish and shellfish diet (otter). Season matters here: the same deer produces textbook pellets in January and a formless clump in May.
The practical consequence: when a shape does not fit, ask what the animal ate that week rather than reaching for a different species. Autumn turns coyote scat into a mass of berry seed and turns black bear scat purple.
Where it was left is half the identification
Many mammals deposit scat as communication, and the placement is deliberate. Reading it as data doubles the information available.
On top of something prominent — a rock, a tussock, a molehill, a fence post, a picnic table — means a territorial marker, and in most of North America that means fox, coyote, bobcat or mustelid. Wild canids advertise. This is also why a dropping on a garden bench is a fox and never a cat.
Buried or half-buried in loose soil, in a flowerbed or dry bed, is a domestic cat.
A repeatedly used pile — a latrine — narrows things very quickly. Raccoons build latrines at the base of trees, in roof valleys, on decks and woodpiles. Otters have haul-out latrines on rocks by water. Groundhogs latrine underground, which is why you find so little around an active burrow.
Along a wall base, indoors, in a consistent line is rodent, because rats and mice follow the same route nightly and travel with one flank in contact with a surface.
In a heap under a single spot on a beam, indoors, is a bat roost — the accumulation is directly beneath where the animals hang.
The health risks, ranked honestly
Most droppings are unpleasant rather than hazardous. Three are genuinely worth respecting, and the ranking is not what most people expect.
| Source | Hazard | Why it matters | Handling |
|---|---|---|---|
| Raccoon latrine | Baylisascaris procyonis roundworm | Eggs survive years in soil, resist disinfectants, and larvae migrate to the brain and eye. Children and anyone who puts hands to mouth are most at risk | Gloves, N95, wet the site first, bag and burn or bin; treat surfaces with boiling water or a flame, not bleach |
| Deer mouse and other Peromyscus | Hantavirus | Inhaled from aerosolised dust; concentrated in closed sheds, cabins and crawl spaces opened after a winter | Ventilate 30 minutes, spray with 1:10 bleach, leave 5 minutes, wipe damp. Never sweep or vacuum dry |
| Bat guano accumulations | Histoplasma capsulatum | A fungus that grows in old guano and causes lung infection when the dust is disturbed | Respirator, wet down, avoid disturbing large deposits without professional help |
| Dog and cat | Toxocara, Toxoplasma, giardia | The everyday risk in gardens and sandpits; toxoplasma matters in pregnancy | Gloves, wash hands, cover sandpits |
| Goose droppings | Campylobacter, giardia | Relevant where children play on fouled grass or where droppings wash into swimming water | Ordinary hygiene; the volume is the problem, not the pathogen |
The general rule that covers all of them: never disturb dry droppings dry. Every serious exposure route on that table is an aerosol, and wetting the material down first removes it. Sweeping a shed floor is how people get hantavirus, and it is entirely avoidable.
Breaking one apart, safely, and what to look for
Contents are the second-strongest character after shape, and you cannot see them from outside. With gloves and a stick, break a dry piece open on the ground and look for four things.
Hair. Coarse guard hairs and fine underfur bound into a rope means a predator ate a mammal. The amount tells you something too — a scat that is almost entirely hair with bone chips is a wolf, a lion or a bobcat that ate a large animal, while a few hairs in a berry mass is a fox or coyote in autumn.
Seeds and skins. Intact seeds mean fruit, and the species of fruit narrows the season and often the habitat. Raccoon and bear scat in September is frequently nothing else.
Insect parts. Iridescent beetle elytra and grasshopper legs sparkle in the light. Skunks, opossums, foxes and bats all show them; a scat that crumbles into insect dust rather than breaking is bat.
A white cap. Birds and reptiles excrete uric acid as a chalky white paste in the same package as the faeces. Mammals do not. If part of it is white, you are looking at a bird, a snake or a lizard.
Finally, note whether it is fresh. A moist surface with a sheen means hours; a dull dry surface with mould bloom means days to weeks. Freshness changes what the find means — a week-old scat tells you a species is in the area, a fresh one tells you it was here last night.
Cleaning up without making it worse
- Suit up before you start. Disposable gloves, a mask for anything dry and enclosed, and boots or shoe covers you can hose. This is a five-minute job that turns a health question into a housekeeping one.
- Wet everything down. A garden sprayer with water or 1:10 bleach solution, applied until the material is soaked, and then five minutes of waiting. Every serious risk on this page travels as dust.
- Lift, do not sweep. Scoop into a bag with a shovel you can disinfect, double-bag, seal, and put it in the household waste.
- Raccoon latrines get boiling water or a flame, not disinfectant. Baylisascaris eggs resist every household chemical. On soil, remove the top layer; on a deck or concrete, pour boiling water; on a roof, hire someone.
- Fix the reason it was there. Cleanup without exclusion just resets the clock. Cap the chimney, screen the soffit vents, secure the bins, take the bird feeder down for two weeks, and clear the woodpile the animal was denning under.
If droppings are appearing indoors, the identification changes the fix entirely: mice need 6 mm gaps sealed, rats need 12 mm gaps and a look at the drains, squirrels need the roofline checked in daylight, and bats need a legally timed one-way exclusion outside the maternity season. Getting the species right first is what stops you sealing an animal inside your roof.
When the droppings are not enough
Scat gets you to a small group reliably and to a species less often than tracking guides suggest. Coyote and large fox overlap. Bobcat and a big house cat overlap. Squirrel and rat overlap in an attic, which is the single most consequential confusion on this page, because the exclusion work is different for each.
When the identification matters — you are deciding whether to let children play in a yard, or which gap to seal — combine three lines of evidence rather than trusting one. Look for tracks in dust or mud nearby, look for entry damage and rub marks, and set a cheap trail camera on the latrine for two nights. A photograph of the animal settles what a photograph of its droppings cannot.
Photographing the scat itself is still worth doing, with something for scale. Size is the second filter in this key and the one most often misjudged from memory, and a dropping photographed next to a coin is a record you can still use a week later.
Questions people ask about this
How do I tell rat droppings from squirrel droppings in my attic?
Rat droppings are 1.5 to 2 cm, spindle-shaped with blunt ends, dark, and laid down in a line along a route the animal uses every night. Squirrel droppings are shorter, distinctly barrel-shaped with rounded ends, lighter brown, and scattered across beams rather than concentrated in runs. The other tell is timing: squirrels are active by day and noisy at dawn, rats are heard after dark.
Is raccoon poop actually dangerous?
Yes, and it is the one entry on this page that justifies real caution. Raccoon latrines can contain Baylisascaris procyonis eggs, which become infective two to four weeks after being deposited, survive years in soil, resist household disinfectants, and can migrate to the brain or eye in a person who ingests them. Wear gloves and a mask, wet the material before disturbing it, bag it, and treat the surface with boiling water or a flame rather than bleach.
What animal leaves droppings on top of a rock or a fence post?
A territorial marker, which in North America and Europe usually means fox, coyote, bobcat, mink or marten. Placing scat on a prominent object is deliberate advertising. It also rules out domestic cats, which bury, and it is why a dropping on a garden bench or a molehill is almost always a fox.
Are those round pellets on my lawn from a deer or a rabbit?
Round and slightly flattened, under 1.2 cm, dry and fibrous means rabbit. Oval, pointed at one end and dimpled at the other, 1 to 2 cm, scattered in groups of dozens means deer. The shape test is reliable; the quantity is not, because both leave a lot.
The droppings look like mouse droppings but crumble to dust. What is that?
Bat guano. It is the same size as mouse droppings but consists entirely of insect exoskeleton, so it crumbles to a glittering powder when crushed with a stick, while mouse droppings stay hard. It also accumulates in one heap directly under the roost rather than scattering. Large accumulations can host the fungus that causes histoplasmosis, so ventilate and wet down before touching it.
Why is part of the dropping white?
Birds and reptiles excrete uric acid as a chalky white paste in the same package as their faeces, so a white cap or streak means a bird, a snake or a lizard, never a mammal. It is the fastest way to rule out the entire mammal half of this key.
How fresh is it?
A moist surface with a sheen is hours old. A dull, dry, crusted surface is days. Mould bloom, fading colour and insect activity mean a week or more. Freshness changes what the find means: old scat proves an animal uses the area, fresh scat means it was there last night and a trail camera will pay off.
Still not sure? Point a camera at it
A filter narrows animals down to a shortlist. Orvik reads the photo itself and names the species, with the look-alikes ranked underneath so you can check the call yourself.