I hate these serial blogs. All week long I’ve been rubbing my hands together in glee, waiting for the opportunity to discuss both economics and the French. The worsening situation in Europe, however, must take a back seat to my commitment to you, and so I’ll pick up where I left off last week.

You’ll remember that I had taken a break from building the chicken run and gone out to the micro-apiary to check on the bees. The skies were clear, blue, and dappled with light clouds, a condition I have gone on about at length in the blog, and the hills, valleys, and woods were predator free, a condition, to date, that I had not yet seen.

Yuck!

I almost fell down avoiding a large pile of relatively fresh looking poo.

Damn dog!

The neighbor’s dog is wont to frequent the micro-farm and leave her steaming piles scattered about at unfortunate locations. But it didn’t look like dog-doo. It was, in fact, like no poo I had seen before; and, as a closet naturalist – not like that – I had seen a lot of poo. To my untrained, yet keenly observant, eye, it looked like it might be elk.

Sadly, there are no elk on Bainbridge Island so I was left, as it were, holding the bag. I gave it several days to see if the neighbors might have made the same assumption I had vis-à-vis: their dog; and come over to clean it up. No such luck. So, shovel in hand, I went out to move the future tomatoes into the compost pile so it could be properly sanitized before the garden turned it into lunch. See how the circle of life works? And why it’s best not to think about it?

Hmmm… I studied the scatological leavings. This was some unusual poo. As I bent over to pick up the biological blessing, I noticed various shoots and leaves sticking out of the organic offering. I scooped it up and noticed that, just a few feet away there was another healthy deposit. It turned out that there was not one pile, but four. All spaced a few feet apart near the compost bins. Not dainty little turd turrets, but good-sized globs of gastro-gifts. In fact, to meet the volume requirements, there must have been several healthy wild animals scoping out the compost bin and which all got hit by nature’s call at the exact same time.

Or one big one.

I discounted that possibility because, despite my writing about cougars, bobcats, and bears, I just didn’t believe those stories. I already eliminated elk as a possibility because, as with bison and polar bears, there just aren’t any around. Deer, well, deer we got and the micro-farm is ankle deep in deer-shit for half the year, so, based on experience, I could rule them out. Similarly, it didn’t look like dog or cat which took the wild canids and felines out of the equation. This really left just one possibility: that one of the cows from Butler Green Farm got loose and paid us a visit.

I put the task of identification out of my mind for a couple of days as I finished up the chicken run. I’m really surprised. The thing can actually stand up by itself and, so far, it hasn’t fallen apart. I tried building it strong and light, like you would a boat, but as construction progressed and I realized exactly what would be involved in keeping out the raccoons and coyotes, well, let’s just say that it’s strong. I’m guessing the coop-du-jour weighs sixty pounds. At least.

The idea – plans not being an option – was to use toothpick-sized boards as framing, and screw and glue the thing together for strength. One thing, as they will, led to another and soon the base of the cage was twice as hefty as I originally intended. Then I had to add a mid-structure arch to hold the twenty pounds of chicken food and feeder they would need. Then there was the place where I split one of the light-weight boards when I accidentally brushed up against it. That had to be reinforced so I did the one on the other side as well. Just in case. Fifty feet of chicken wire fencing went into the two-layered, electrically-tricky raccoon zapper that keeps the bad guys out and the chickens safe. All in all, I’m guessing that the run is about three pounds of wood and the rest metal in the form of poultry netting – the fancy name for chicken wire, reinforcing, and screws. Lots and lots of screws. Boxes of them. Crates.

But it’s all put together and, assuming it doesn’t collapse when I hang the feeder, it’ll be ready for occupancy on Friday.

The run now done, I was still worried about the dubious droppings out in the west forty (square yards). I wanted to avoid the cost of a DNA analysis but more research was in order before I could but my budding coprophobia to rest.

Yes, of course there are websites dedicated to such topics.

Using Google in anonymous mode led me to a variety of websites indicating exactly how far from the Garden we have fallen. I know I will never look at Platex Living Gloves in exactly the same way again. Ever. Really. But eventually, about ten pages and three hours after viewing the site about installing over-sized plumbing in your shower, I found what I was looking for.

It’s the website of the Internet Center for Wildlife Damage Management; icwdm.com if you’re interested. They offer a boatload (What? You think I like taking the easy ones?) of information about how wild animals are out to get you and should be sent packing on sight. The problem is that most wild animals don’t like to be seen – probably for this very reason – and so operate at night. And very quietly. This makes the identification problem a process of elimination, so to speak. ICWDM has a variety of decision trees that you can follow to identify the culprit using the damage done, the traces of nests, any “bones or skeletal remains” – a category clearly suggested by the Department of Redundancy Department, the location of the infestation, and, to our needs, the excremental calling cards placed randomly in the meadow.

I clicked on “Scat”.

It didn’t get any less complicated.

Identifying animals using their droppings is fraught with risk as “simple changes in an animal’s diet can dramatically change the color, shape and contents of feces making it difficult to determine the source of the droppings without scientific equipment.” After seeing all the pages that Google returned before I got to this one, I had no desire to find out what that “equipment” might be. You must also be careful because “droppings are dirty and germy.” Unlike, say, the handles on shopping carts at Walmart.

Regardless, I continued my search. There were three methods of identifying the poo: by color; by looking at a vast selection of pictures; and by using the time-tested method of the “Scat Dichotomous Key”. The last sounded very fancy, so I went there first.

A dichotomous key is a pedantic, though less long-winded, way of saying “multiple choice but the multiple is always two.” The user is given two choices which direct their search in the proper direction. The scat-key is a page of boxes connected by arrows none of which pointed to anything more ferocious than a vole. My search wasn’t shaping up well at all. In their defense ICWDM did say that the key was “not complete”.

I moved on to photos.

I’ve got to say here that poking around in some buffalo-chip-filled Photobucket is not my idea of a good time, even given the current exigencies for a positive identification. The headings of the sub-albums were appealingly titled: Pellets, Plop, Tubular-large, Tubular-small, and White. Each category had a helpful example photo under it but I must admit that the photo displayed under “White” put me completely off my feed.

My final opportunity for a positive ID lay in the color based decision tree. It was simple enough, and thankfully the only two color choices were white and non-white. Our sample was decidedly non-white so I was able to allay my fears about unwittingly opening an image and seeing that, that, that thing which was shown in the photo section. After clicking non-white I had to decide whether the poo in question was tubular – like the sausages your shih tzu leaves; pelleted – like the pet Guinea pig you had as a child; or globular.

Yes!

I clicked on globular and a page came up showing an image that was an absolute dead-ringer for the crap out back.

Unfortunately, the caption said Ursus americanus, AKA black bear.

Oh shit, oh dear.

Forget the eagles, the coyotes, the raccoons, and the otters. This is a predator of concern. The ICWDM site describes using “blaring music, pyrotechnics, and guarding dogs” to “provide temporary relief from damage.” None of which will stand us in good stead with the neighbors.

We’re hoping that the bear may have been visiting to check out the food in the compost pile. Or, it may have swung by to have a sniff at the bee hives. But, it could just have moved into the neighborhood and was coming by for an introduction. It doesn’t really matter because now I am so not going outside at night without a flashlight and an updated copy of my will. Imagine walking out and stumbling into five-hundred pounds of something that wants to eat the chickens, the bees, everything in the garden, and you.

It’s enough to scare the crap out of you.