This is another post on tracking animals in southern Africa. Scatology is the biological study of or preoccupation with excrement. Scientists and naturalists often study feces to determine or learn about an animals diet or health or diseases and so forth. Our safari guides also used poop piles to determine what animals were in the area, much like their prints. So here’s a Poop Posting.

I have to say that sometimes, without any prior training, it was actually very easy to do. In this first photo for instance, before our safari guides said a word, I knew we were on the trail of a large parade of elephants.

This second one was tough at first, but after learning about it, it was really easy to identify going forward. These are called “hyena rocks”. Why? Because this is hyena scat. It’s white because the hyenas eat the whole animal, including the bones. Because they eat an animal’s bones, they get large amounts of calcium, hence the white scat.

This was really a hard one at first. If you look close, you can see that the entire area of the photo has manure sprayed on it. You can see it on the big tree, the bushes, the grass, and the ground. This is Hippo’s feces. The male hippo does this to mark his territory. He turns around and backs up, then as he starts to poop, he swishes his tail to fan the poop out onto a larger area – to better mark his territory. Again, once we learned this, we saw lots of hippo poop and kept a lookout for hippos.

These next two go together. The first one is elephant scat and everyone probably guessed it. The large lumps of poop could be six to eight inches across. I have nothing in this photo for scale, but the lumps were really large. We saw lots and lots of elephant poop on our game drives.

Then one day while on a game drive in Kafue National Park, we saw the poop below. It looked like elephant poop, but clearly different. The lumps were much smaller and much rounder. Vicky called our safari guide to stop the land rover. She pointed out the difference to him, but he didn’t seem to understand. He just went on about it being elephant poop. Vicky persisted and he finally realized what she was saying. He then explained that some nearby trees were coconut palm trees, but a different variety from the coconuts that we are familiar with. In this case, he said the elephants shake the trees and then eat the coconuts. But the elephants can only digest the outer portion of the coconuts and not the inner portion, or nuts. So the small round balls are the coconut nuts that have passed through the elephant’s system. Upon finally realizing Vicky’s point, our safari guide somewhat sheepishly complimented her on her astute observation. Vicky replied - with attitude, and I quote, “Hey, I know my shit!”