Things we learned on safari – Part 2: Poop!
Dec 24th, 2006 by Oana
One of the key parts of tracking is watching for (and sometimes following the smell of) animal droppings. Unfortunately we did not take too many photos of poop, so use your imagination.
- elephants have only 1 stomach, which makes for terrible digestion of their usual diet of reeds, grass, twigs, branches, roots – their poop has whole blades of grass and twigs in it, mostly undigested, and it kind of looks like hay. Other animals and insects find elephant poop quite a good meal!
- rhinos use middens for their poop, then rub their feet in it and walk around their territory to mark it
- white rhinos are grazers and black rhinos are browsers – if you look closely, white rhino pooh contains blades of grass cut at a (precisely) 45 degree angle
- a herd of impala all poop in the same spot, and it looks like someone spilled a giant box of chocolate-covered peanuts
- hyena poop is white because of all the bones they eat
- leopards pull prey into a tree to enjoy it in peace, away from other predators – check out the skeleton in the tree in the photo below
- because they eat so much bloody meat, leopard poop is black and incredibly stinky – we could smell it from the safari vehicle!
- a little bit of lion poop spread around your garden will keep stray cats away – it’s a territorial thing again
- fortunately for humans in the bush, toilet paper grows on a tree!
