Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Animal Tracking: Down The Rabbit Hole

There is still one tree left that is dropping apples - and I am not the only one who is gathering them! Yesterday I knelt down the gather a bag full up apples for some potential apple sauce, I could see that deer had been there amongst other critters nibbling the fruit too. When I leaned forward to grab a nice dark red apple I saw rabbit scat (poop) in three piles right ahead of me.
The scat was obviously fresh and from my point of view I could see a well worn thin trail...
I followed the trail carefully looking for more evidence, after about 10 feet of winding i found a half eaten apple. :) It was freshly eaten within a 1-2 hours, the apples falling wild from the trees turn brown really fast once open.
Then next to some rocks i found more apple bits, but these much were older. Possibly the rabbit's compost pile. ;)
And there was the hole... where the rabbit stays! Awwww, cute.
What an awesome place to live!
XOXO

3 comments:

Panne said...

that is deer scat. and the "compost pile" is regurgitated apple. deer will often gorge themselves in high traffic areas and then barf it up to eat it later in a safe spot to reduce their risk.

Miss Voodoo said...

Hey Panne!
I thought deer scat was a bit bigger balls? I will have to check on this! Both deer and bunny run around quite a bit right there (that i have actually seen) - i did see some other scat right nearby too, which looked more like a cow patty but a smaller one(liquidy and not formed)... i wondered if the deers were getting mushy poop from eating tons of apples?
I did think the "compost pile" looked like barf though. Thanks for the info on the gorging. :)

Panne said...

the cow patty looking scat was from over consumption most likely. rabbit scat won't clump together unless the animal is ill. it looks like cocoa puffs 99% of the time.

deer scat most times isn't clumped and is very similar to goat scat. the clumping is due to excessive fruit in their diet.