Identify the poo!! (1 Viewer)

[Luca's Ade]

Pigeon, squirrel or something else? A big heap of it on top of my bird table.

CLICK

 

[Nutcracker]

Dunno, but whatever it was, had been waiting a long time, by the looks of it :eek!:

 

[Gill Osborne]

VERY bizarre....I haven't the foggiest!
Somebody will know! LOL

GILL

 

[LSB]

Bird Sp you can tell by the white around the "worm".Dont know what tho... :eek!:

 

[peterbest37]

Looks like a snake to me. There must be someone out there with the knowledge about bird droppings

 

[buckskin hawk]

I did use a book for an activity at scout camp entitled "Who's responsible for this?". I found it at my local birding store and I have seen them in other stores. The girls (yes Girl Scouts) loved it. Don't remember seeing anything like this in the book or in any nature center.

I know it isn't horse-just cleaned the stall tonight. In fact, I don't see any undigested seeds or anything else. Could it be a carnivore. I don't know.

 

[helenol]

A long shot, but how about weasel or stoat?

 

[Joern Lehmhus]

The white parts indicate that this is bird poo-they excrete ureic acid (not water soluble) instead of urea (water soluble).

I have seen similar droppings excretetd by thrushes(Blackbird , fieldfare) after a diet of earthworms-because of the soil in the worms digestive tract; as this soil can only partly be removed by the bird) .

 

[Luca's Ade]

Haha, thanks for trying so far. Joern says posibly a blackbird, that would make most sense so far as I have about 7 that visit at the moment, I've just never seen anything so big come out of such a small creature :eek!: :-O

 

[buckskin hawk]

Haha, thanks for trying so far. Joern says posibly a blackbird, that would make most sense so far as I have about 7 that visit at the moment, I've just never seen anything so big come out of such a small creature :eek!: :-O

Okay I just talked to the Biology professor down the hall. She got a kick out of the picture and suggested that this is most likely a mammal with worms. The worms were expelled in the poo and the tube like structures are the casting left after the worms devoured the poo. Some worms are more active in the spring and most likely this animal needs to be dewormed. --which reminds me this is the month to worm my horses. (Horses must be wormed every three months here.)

I asked this professor because she has a lab where they analyze the contents of some poo. --We all leave our offices early that afternoon!

 

[Yernagates]

The odd thing about this is that there are two different diameters -- a big solid one underneath, and lots of thin stuff on top. I can see why the biol prof suggested what she did, but I don't think that's it, as generally parasitic gut worms don't eat dung.

I can only think of two possibilities. One is that the smaller diameter comes from the food, not the gut -- perhaps this bird has been eating lots of spaghetti...

The other is, could this perhaps be two different animals? The underneath part looks like a classic bird dropping -- as Joern says, the white uric acid urine paste is very clear. The thin stuff on the top has no white, so could perhaps be a mammal, using the previous dollop as a marker post. Can't think what mammal though... The only thing I can think of which produces extruded dark dung of that sort of diameter would be a stoat or weasel, but the amount looks too large.

Could we have some measurements please?

Richard

 

[alcedo.atthis]

Oystercatcher after a diet of Lug Worms.

Regards

Malky. (LOL)

 

[Luca's Ade]

LOL, whoever thought poo could be so fascinating.

The actual size is about 2/3 that of the photo, so about 2" across.

 

[mikesmithy]

green woodpecker ??

 

[TWM]

I've had similar here and always reckoned it was pigeon poo!

 

[Dave J]

Definitely not green woodpecker. I agree with Richard - bird poo on bottom with possibly mammal poo on top

 

[Yernagates]

I can only think of two possibilities.

Just thought of another...

I've been looking at the dung of my own poultry, and having vague recollections of bird biology.

As I remember (some?) birds can produce two kinds of droppings. One is from the caecum, a wide, dead-end part of the gut. You notice these particularly in domestic hens when a sitting bird comes off the nest for a dropping -- she's been saving it up, and often produces an enormous roundish pile of stuff, smelling even viler than chicken dung usually does.

However, droppings can also come more directly from the main intestine, when they are more extruded in shape. My chickens' droppings do often seem to have a bigger round lump underneath, with thinner stuff on top (not nearly as thin as the mystery one though).

The white part is of course urine, produced in birds (as in most reptiles, spiders and some desert mammals) as a paste of uric acid crystals. The urinary tract has a common opening with the gut (the cloaca), and so the urine is passed with the dung. I think it tends to come out first, so perhaps ending up mainly on the larger, caecal dropping.

So I wonder if the mystery dropping is all one bird, of a caecal dropping with fine-gut stuff on the top. So we just have to find a bird with a largish caecum and lots of smaller gut. I think not a carnivore, which tends to have a wide-bore, straight-through "sports" gut.

Richard