Scatology

To follow on the track of fish, birds, or any other animals, might be both discovery and repetition, because it might mean to go exhaustively into the nature of being alive.

—John Hay

The coyotes are here. I’ve picked up six separate samples of scat on the back trail behind our house. I’ve even used my beagle, Murphy, to help me find the scat. Murphy keeps his nose close to the ground as we walk. I never thought of using my dog as my own personal scat detector until I read an article about a researcher in New York State who trained her Labrador retriever to seek out scat and sit beside those droppings left only by coyotes. It sounded like a good idea, so I watched Murphy closely, and sure enough, the first day he walked off the trail to pinpoint three deposits in the dry leaves I would have passed right by. I even took to carrying treats in my pocket so I could reward him each time we came upon these signs.

Why care what’s shitting in your neighborhood? Because each deposit is like a book waiting to be read. From what’s left behind it’s possible to find out what your animal neighbors have been eating. Scatology is a little like going through the garbage cans lined up on the street on pickup day. The first time Murphy led me to a deposit of scat I picked up a twig and poked through what he had found. Four inches long, the scat was pinched at one end. First thing I noticed was that my defecating neighbor had been feasting on late-season persimmons. The shiny, cinnamon-colored seeds clogged the dark brown deposit.

Once I got into the scat project I made an intricate map of the series of trails in the corridor of woods behind our house and numbered each intersection, one through six. When I found a deposit I placed it in a plastic baggie, and—with the Sharpie I carried in my pocket—I logged the location, date, and weather like a scientist.

It is now a January morning and I’m walking through some woods along Lawson’s Fork above Glendale, South Carolina. The trail is through bare winter woods. I’m walking with my friend Mike Willis. Mike used to be a trapper, so I guess you could say he’s retired, though he’s only in his mid-fifties. Following us is my Wofford College colleague Gerald Thurmond and fifteen of his interim students. Gerald’s class is spending the entire month in search of animal signs utilizing a series of morning meetings and hikes like this one to learn the world of scat and signs.

Neither Gerald nor I are biologists. Gerald’s a sociology professor. Mostly what Gerald teaches is social psychology—gender and the family—but these interim classes give him a chance to tune up the natural history he practices. We take these walks in the woods for many reasons: love, curiosity, and a range of other emotions and drives that are only half understood. Neither one of us has the connection to the wild world that Mike has, though we both wish we did.

As an American archetype, trapping runs deep. The image of the mountain man alone, dressed as an Indian, wading through deep snow, his horse heavy with sets of traps, has been celebrated in western novels like Mountain Man by Vardis Fisher and films such as Sydney Pollack’s Jeremiah Johnson starring Robert Redford. Mike’s been trapping on these trails since his boyhood days. I always wonder what he sees as he walks through these woods. I know he sees signs and tracks we don’t see. I wonder if he sees any portents that might lead me to the coyotes I seek. What would happen if Mike turned his attention to the coyotes behind our house as I have done? Could he catch them? Could he track them along these trails and set traps for them and bring them...