Crow’s Nest: Scat Lab

By Molly Smyrl, Environmental Educator.

Photo: Laura George

How do you get a group of High School students excited to learn about animal scat? By having them make it in edible form, of course!

Those who are familiar with our annual Edible Scat Fundraiser may not find the idea of chocolate scat that strange, but many of the students in the “Ecology: Temperate and Tropical Ecosystems” class at Owen J. Roberts High School didn’t know what they were in for when they boarded the school vans to come to Crow’s Nest for a lab! You can imagine the looks of confused horror on their faces when they found out they were going to be making edible animal poop!

Photo: Laura George.

Once the students got over their initial surprise, we did a brief introduction on why scat ID is an important skill for tracking wildlife, and reviewed some of the criteria they would need to consider when trying to identify scat in the field: How much scat is there? What shape is it? Where in the landscape was it found? What’s in the scat—does it have animal fur or plant seeds or insect exoskeletons in it?

After covering the basics, we got started making scat from various animals found in our region. Some of the scat was types that the students would be most likely to find in the field, including deer, fox, raccoon, and Canada Goose. We also covered several less-common species including coyote, black bear, river otter, beaver, turkey, skunk, and porcupine.

Photo: Laura George

The students had the chance to add in any “extras” to the scat (such as shredded wheat to represent animal fur, or sesame seeds to represent berry seeds) and then to shape each type of scat. Hopefully, this hands-on experience with the different scat types will help them identify scat for a class project later this month.

The lab ended, of course, with tasting the different kinds of scat we made—a step they were reminded not to try when they find scat out in the field!

Photo: Laura George