Animal Tracking: Who's Scat Is That?

I might need ya'lls help! You see I found this scat about a week ago and can't quite seem to identify who poop'ed this one out?!

I know it appears to be hairy in the pic, but in real life and if you click the pic to a larger size you will see it is more like a fungus growing on it, rather then hair sticking out. It seems to be a grouping of large (as in much larger then a deer, rabbit or even a raccoon) pellets that are more oval shaped.

The closest I could find to this scat in my trusty rusty lil' scat book was that it may be a groundhog... except everyone says it's rare to see groundhog scat because usually they poop inside a special place in the tunnels at their home. An underground groundhog bathroom.

So could this be a rare moment of a groundhog poopin' in the wild instead of at his hand built potty place?

So, Help! Who shat this scat?
XOxoxo

Animal Tracking: Black Bear Scat

One scoop of peach bear poop please! In a cup not a cone. ;)

Here is a blop of scat nobody coulda' missed while walking down the remote gravel road... it almost looked like one of those rubber joke poops, but upon a closer look I could see it had fruit skins in it (and not the usual joke corn).

Also it was very, very fresh and only the baking sun had darkened the very thin exterior.

The longer I sat there examining it, the more evidence that appeared - not just in the poop but on the wind. I smelled something strong and skunky... I tended to think it was a skunk, until my donkey's behavior began to change to something nervous and agressive, something frightened.

I broke the scat open to see it just fell apart, fresh, warm, and strong smelling. FULL of fruit...

10 feet away from the scat was a tall peach tree with tons of little half rotted peaches on the ground.

If I was a bear in the Fall season, I would stand guard near the last peaches of the year too. JuJu the donkey let me know under no uncertain terms that there was a bear in the area by looking up into the forested area over and over, alert, freaked out, and tried forcing me to run away with her by jumping, running back and forth, making huge eyes. When she realized i was not going to run she gave up on my stupid human self and she took off running alone! I found out where she was when i got a call from a neighbor that she was grazing their lawn.

Are humans less aware then they used to be... or are we that arrogent that we don't fear wild animals anymore, even unarmed? Why don't our instincts force us running, but instead thinking?

Xoxoxox

Animal Tracking: Black Bear Scat?

While me and JuJu the donkey were on one of our walks I came upon this scat (poop) in the gravel road. I knew right away it was not raccoon scat, bird scat, or deer scat because of the shape...
it had some round berries in it and didn't look hairy so I felt perplexed as to whether it might be coyote scat either.
Fox? A bit of black bear poop? Opossum?
Following scat descriptions, I know that canine's have poop that gets pointy on the ends and bobcats have a tubular shape too - deer and rabbit poop comes out in pellets (rabbit's having a more dry, flat, & separated look, deer being a bigger wet pile of pellets), wild turkey scat looks like a big bird poop with the white mixed in. Raccoon's look like alot of lil' cylinder tubes of poop, and opossums are kinda like a coyote poop that has bumps strung together....
*
This left me with one choice... a choice I smelled about 50 feet down the road....
A Black BEAR!
Further down the way I smelled a strong odor, one that was like skunky urine. I immediately knew it was a bear, I assume from some deep biological part of my brain that carries primitive instincts cause I have not seen a bear urinate & then sniffed it after. It's something you just know when it blows into your nose. A bear smells like no other animal and it's generally skunky stinky dread locked dirty pungent aroma can't be missed.
*
Now I realize, the bear has been hanging all around my cabin, this poop with these berries in it are everywhere in the woods.
XOxoxo

(Not) Trespassing: The Blue Shack

Decay doesn't have to take 100 years, sometimes just in your own life span humans can build things, and watch their tiny personal empire fall to pieces. There's always a hidden story, a mini drama, a loss, forgotten time or sometimes a death these places hold onto... but for the blue shack not very much longer.

Ya might notice there isn't any No Trespassing signs on this property, and that is because it is for sale - under $100,000 with 13 acres! ( If you want to know where it's located in Western North Carolina, send me an email.)

The house is caving in. Literally. Porch posts leaning into a V shape, if you step on the covered porch floor boards your foot will go through it. Windows are broken, wood is bending, pieces of the roof are falling off.... yet it still holds it's bright blue spirit, you can still read some of the dreams that were afloat when it was built.

The back of the house pushes up to a rather steep hill, which is probably why the blue paint has washed off, the wall is pushing outward under the weight of the roof.... even a piece of the whole back wall has opened up and a freakin' lawn chair is poking out! Somehow that is creepy.

Peeking into the windows, I didn't find much on the inside of the house --- the usual anticipation to see something beautiful in it's last run of decay was not really even there...

Unless you feel a toilet seat is beautiful....

The ceiling is peeling off in sheets, which shows the rafters.... the rafters are the only thing about the structure that still looks stable. "Stable" being used real loosely.

Since there was 13 more acres of mystery to explore, I set off up the long winding road that led back up the side of the mountain. Plants & wildlife abound...

EDIBLE, MEDICINAL, and NATIVE PLANTS :::::::::

The Fiddle Head Fern... Edible when it first shoots up in the spring.Raspberries!!! Mmmmmm - the berries will pop out those hairy shells....

Blackberries ..... about to be ripe!

Woodland Nettles and Jewelweed growing in patches together.... ( so if the nettles sting you, you can put the jewelweed on your skin to sooth it!)

Pokeberry.... not yet ready to use for dye, but the white flowers turn into dark purple berries. You can eat the young plant in the spring, but not the berries or the mature plant (although i have heard people debate this!)

Bloodroot! My favorite native plant eva' ! The root is used for dye and medicine.

Mountain Mint?? Some kind of minty, menthol, bee balm smelling herb that grows in the woods here....

More HUMAN STUFF :::::::

In places along the road there was old fencing, from when this land was most likely a pasture with some type of domesticated animal... I have heard stories from locals about how their parents or grandparents made pasture by digging around & cutting roots of trees then having them pulled by mules out the ground. That's a shit ton of work!
There was also a small hidden barn, with wide open slats --- it was totally covered in thorny wild roses making it impossible for me to go inside or get near it!

In a lil' nook I saw this cinder block built contraption, that upon closer examination I realized was an old spring water box....

I would not be drinking the water from this thing anymore- it was full of mud and I did not see water in it... either that spring has run dry or the box was old enough to have a leak down below.

ANIMAL EVIDENCE::::::

Even though there had been a big huge rain storm just last night, I still found a few bits of evidence left by the wildlife on that property.

First, coyote scat (poop) totally rained on so hard that most the poop part was gone and all that was left was the huge hair glob left from the little critters it had eaten.

Then a fresh deer track in the mud, it slid a little downward because of the steep part of the path...

right next to the deer track was a patch of jewelweed (see the pic below) that the tops of the plants were eaten off....

THE ROAD ENDS :::::::::

The long long long road ended at the top of a ridge, which behind the trees you could see lots of mountains.

On my way back down I stopped to take a pic with the rocks being exposed from the erosion along the road... I LOVE big funky rocks! ANd I loooooove (not) trespassing. :)

XOxoxoox

DIY:Rabbit Poo & Earth Clay Pottery

I get really excited when I think about making any kind of art supply/craft with stuff right outside my house for free, earth friendly & simple. So when I was told I could make some pottery with dried rabbit poop (alternately bone dry horse or cow poop) and some clay-ish soil dug from the ground I could not wait to get my hands on this project! So here is the 100% natural, chemical free, and old world process I tried out ::::

Gathering Supplies:

You will need to find some kind of super duper dried up poop of a grass/plant eating animal - and some dirt. The more hard clay the dirt is the better and easier to begin with. Sand can also be added to this project but I didn't have any, so I tried it without.

Gathering rabbit poop takes a while cause it's not exactly huge, but I knew a spot in a open area where I'd seen bunches of scat and tried filling up my can.... You'll want as much as you can get cause the more the poop the more malleable the clay will be.
Then I went to a spot I had found some clay a few inches under the black soil, it was a yellow/tan/brown colored clay.

Setting Up A Work Space:

I took a bench and set up a pile of the clay on a piece of wood I could knead the clay on, a plate of water for wetting the clay, and the rabbit poop to be crushed/powdered.
The Process:

I put the rabbit scat in a bowl and took a rough stone to crush it into a powder. The poop has to be super dry for this to work good.

In mortar and pedestal fashion, the poop will become a powder that you will need to add bit by bit to the clay.
I added it in slowly, kneading in the rabbit scat and water to keep it wet. The clay-ish dirt went from cracking and hard to work with to becoming a slimy traditional clay that was easy to shape and play with. More poop seems to mean more awesome!
Just like store bought clay, ya gotta roll it, mash it, move it, work it over and over to get it the right consistency. Also working out air bubbles.
I added water to keep if from cracking often... (i wonder if the sand would help with binding it together also???)
Pretty rad, right? Went from dirt in the ground to a ball of clay ready to be the whim of human imagination or functionality.
I decided to make a small simple coil pot, starting with a round slab - I didn't want to get in depth till i learned out the clay would work and dry...
Coil pots are jus' rolling out little snakes, and coiling them upward...
Then you can smooth the coil together with wet hands, to make the sides flat.
YAY! little pot. Tiny pot! Poop pot! Lovely pot!
I played around with making marks on it too with my knife (see below).

THE NEXT DAY:

So the next day my pot was rock hard, and I don't think it was even nearly all the way dry. First I am experimenting with sun drying, and then I would like to later throw it on a fire and hope it doesn't explode. But there was a problem already..........
It freakin' CRACKED on tha' bottom. shit. . . . . Nothing a little more clay can't fill in though.
What'dya say, that this DIY eco art project is a 90% success and 10% fail ? Seems 100% amazing to me regardless of the end result.
And, it still looks good from far away. ;)
Xoxoxox