However improbable

Another holiday is upon us, and while I could celebrate it most days with a little effort, this time I have a nice example picked up yesterday (well, not literally, that’d be gross) to use. Yes indeed, it’s Nature Boi Detective Day, when we sit down and try to determine what produced some particular tableau found out in the wild someplace. This has come under attack from the moment it was conceived of course, for being both gender and age specific as well as unfriendly to urban dwellers, until it was pointed out that “boi” isn’t a real word so the definition of it can’t be used for tirades, plus we still have Mothers’ Day so go fuck yourselves.

All that out of the way, let’s take a look at what we’re going to evaluate today, shall we?

unidentified scat found in wooded area near lake's edge, showing complete bones of unknown mammal, with scale inserted
This was found near the edge of Jordan Lake during a student outing yesterday, though I used my sandal as the initial scale and this allowed me to paste in a digital one for reference. While this is obviously the aftermath of one animal being consumed by another, it’s not exactly clear whether this is feces after being washed out by hard rains, or the casting of some larger bird. It has the look of a typical owl or hawk casting, but a) it’s quite big, and b) those bones are pretty damn big to be swallowed whole. Some vertebrae can be seen in there, a few ribs it looks like, plus several smaller bones that I can’t place right now. I’m almost certain that I’m seeing both a femur/humerus (single long bone) and a tibia/fibula or radius/ulna pair (two longer bones together,) both in excess of 50mm in length, so this is much larger than a rat, which the vertebrae help confirm.

But given their position in the casting, especially smaller bones entangled in hair, while not laid out in rough skeletal form, this isn’t simply an animal that died there – this was digested. Yet those leg bones are whole and within the scat, so they appear to have been swallowed whole.

unidentified scat of unknown mammal, showing hair and bones
Given the size, it would appear to be at least a small rabbit in size, but I’m more inclined to say it was adult, while the color of the hair within points more towards opossum – I can’t say that I’ve dissected either but the proportions seem correct to me. Except that, nearly everything that I can think of that would tackle something that size (fox, coyote, wolf, hawks, owls,) is unlikely to eat their prey whole, and the meat would be stripped from the larger bones rather than swallowing them. Great blue herons will swallow their prey whole and they will indeed tackle some mammals – I watched one take a small muskrat once – but this seems both large and not a typical choice of meal for them.

So I’m leaning towards coyotes or wolves, though I’m not sure any wolves have ever been spotted anywhere near here – coyotes, however, are definitely around. Would a coyote swallow the legs of an opossum or similar-sized mammal whole? It seems awkward (and perhaps a little dangerous) but possible I suppose, and I don’t know enough about their eating habits to weigh in on this usefully. I did not start digging through the scat (again, I was with a student,) so I can’t vouch for the coarseness of the hair nor whether tail bones could be found, which might have helped determine what species this had been, though not what species had consumed it.

Feel free to weigh in if you have any input at all – it is still the holiday after all, and even if you’re late I promise not to turn you in.