White-tailed deer drops more clues in my yard

Pile of droppings from a white-tailed deer.
Photo by Brad Sylvester. copyright 2011. Do not copy.

In my last entry, I showed the tracks of the white-tailed deer in the shallow snow in my back yard. Read details about deer tracks and white-tailed deer information at this entry. I have had the trailcam set up for 24 hours in a position where the tracks suggest deer pass fairly regularly. Checking it this morning, it recorded no activity.

However, I did find new evidence of white-tailed deer living in my yard yesterday morning when I was setting up the trail cam. That evidence was scat or deer droppings. As I mentioned in the previous post, white-tailed deer are ruminants, meaning they have several chambers in their stomachs and chew their cud to get the maximum amount of nutrition from their food. This results in droppings or scat with a very uniform consistency, there are no identifiable bits of wood fibers or anything else in white-tailed deer scat.

Detail of white-tailed deer scat showing tapered nub at
the ends of the pellets.
Photo by Brad Sylvester. Copyright 2011. Do not copy.

White-tailed deer scat takes the form of a small pile of pellets each measuring roughly 5/8" in length. The pellets are all very similar in shape. They are little ovals with a small nub at the end as it tapers down as shown in the detail picture to the right. Rabbit pellets will be distinctly round as opposed to oval shaped. Porcupine pellets will vary in length and shape as opposed to uniform deer pellets.

Some animals leave droppings outside their dens and it eventually builds up to large accumulations of droppings. Deer are not one of these. Deer droppings will be found in small, isolated piles along the path the deer followed.

Depending upon the deer's diet, the pellets may all be stuck together in a clump, but in my experience, this is fairly rare in New England and you are much more likely to find deer droppings as individual pellets as shown in the photos on this page.

Determining the Age of Deer Scat

The exact color of the white-tailed deer's scat may vary according to diet as well. Generally black to dark brown when fresh and turning light brown to tan when old and thoroughly dried out. The dropping shown in these pictures are between 2 days and 5 days old. I can tell that they are fairly fresh from the look of them, but I walked the trail on which they were found several times a week and so was able to establish that time window for their deposit. If you slice them in half, deer droppings tend to dry out from the inside out and you can tell about how old they are by the amount of drying inside. I'm not cutting these open to demonstrate. It takes some practice, but to learn the typical drying patterns, find a fresh pile along a frequently travelled trail and cut open a pellet every day so you know the exact age of the scat and can see how much it dries each day. This may vary by the season and weather, as well. Then, when you are hunting or scouting hunting locations, you'll be able to tell the approximate age of the scat and determine how fresh the trail you're following may be.

Other aging clues are the amount of fallen leaves or other debris on top of the scat pile or snowfall.

With the tracks I had already found, I was quite confident that white-tailed deer lived in my yard. Now, the scat provides even more solid evidence of their frequent presence in my back yard, so we can definitely say that white-tailed deer live in my yard.