Talking Sh*t: A Serious Guide to What Animals Leave Behind

I’ll be honest with you, I get genuinely excited about poop. Not in a weird way (okay, maybe a little bit). But when you’re out walking with guests and you spot something unusual on the path, your eyes light up, you crouch down, and you start examining it like it’s evidence at a crime scene. And honestly? It kind of is. Animal droppings are a window into the secret lives of the creatures that share this bush with us.

Here’s the thing: what an animal leaves behind tells a story. Size, shape, consistency, colour, even what’s actually in it, all of this is like reading a chapter of that animal’s biography. It’s honestly one of the best non-invasive ways to understand what’s living around you, what it’s eating, and how it’s getting along.

But before we dive into some of the more interesting finds you might stumble across in the Soutpansberg, let me clarify three terms that wildlife folk use when talking about animal droppings. They sound like jargon, but once you know them, you’ll spot the patterns everywhere.

The Three Terms You Need to Know

1. Dung = the droppings of herbivores (plant-eaters)
2. Faeces = the droppings of omnivores (plant and animal-eaters)
3. Scat = the droppings of carnivores (meat-eaters)

The words themselves actually tell you something about the diet. Neat, right?

The Giraffe: Small Surprises from a Massive Animal

Here’s the one that catches almost everyone off guard.

A giraffe is a colossal creature, up to 5.5 metres tall, weighing nearly 2 tonnes. You watch one gliding through the acacia trees with that impossible elegance, and you’d think the dung it produces would match that sheer scale. But it doesn’t. At all.

Giraffe dung comes out as small, round pellets about 1.5cm in diameter, roughly the size of a marble. You’ll find them scattered on the ground in little clusters, and if you didn’t know what you were looking at, you might actually mistake them for something left by a much smaller animal.

Why? It all comes down to digestive efficiency.

Giraffes are ruminants, which means they have a specialised four-chambered stomach that’s incredibly efficient at extracting nutrients and water from vegetation. Because their digestive system is so highly efficient, the resulting waste is dry and condensed. They eat constantly throughout the day, but their system wrings out as much goodness as possible before anything gets excreted. The end result? Those compact little marbles.

And here’s a fun detail: since an adult giraffe’s anus is about six feet above the ground, the pellets fall a significant distance, often bouncing and rolling when they hit the surface. There’s your digestive geography lesson for the day.

The Hyena: Bone-White Droppings That Tell a Hunting Story

If you’ve ever been walking through the bush and spotted something that looks like a weathered chalk stone on the side of the road, there’s a good chance you’ve found hyena scat.

It’s unmistakably white, or pale cream-coloured when fresh, turning brilliant white once it’s dried out. And that colour is the giveaway to what these animals do for a living.

Their scat is white as a result of the amount of calcium they consume in the bones they eat. Unlike other carnivores that leave bones behind, hyenas have jaws that can crush through virtually anything. With their powerful jaws, hyenas crunch bones like none other to get at the marrow. They grind, digest, and process that calcium, which then ends up in their waste.

Here’s where it gets genuinely interesting: hyena dung contained between 1,000 and 20,000 times as much calcium and phosphorous as local soils. This isn’t just waste, it’s an ecological service, recycling nutrients back into the environment.

It’s a brutal, efficient system. Kill, digest, deposit minerals—repeat.

The Aardvark: A Rare Find That’s Worth Getting Excited About

(And yes, I was the only one excited when we found aardvark scat on a walk. The guests seemed bemused.)

Aardvark droppings are genuinely rare to encounter, and there’s a reason for that: the aardvark buries its waste. Carefully. Methodically. This nocturnal digger will scrape out a shallow depression, do its business, and then cover it over with excavated soil, which is actually behaviour that several animals exhibit, but the aardvark takes it seriously.

Aardvark scat is seldom encountered while out in the bush, as droppings tend to be covered up or buried beneath excavated soil. When you do find them, aardvark scat is distinctive, being composed of soil impregnated with the heads of termites and ants.

The pellets themselves are oval in shape, and contain a lot of sand and soil which the animal ingested when feeding on its prey. That gritty texture and composition tells you exactly what this creature spends its night doing: penetrating termite and ant mounds with its powerful claws, extending its sticky 45-centimetre tongue into the narrow tunnels, and extracting insects by the thousands.

If you find aardvark scat, you’ve genuinely spotted something special. It means an aardvark has been working this area, probably within the last few nights. It’s the kind of discovery that reminds you that there’s far more happening in this bush than what we see during the day.

What the Droppings Actually Tell Us

So why does this matter? Because every time you bend down to examine what an animal has left behind, you’re learning something about the broader ecosystem.

The contents of scat, such as plant material or fur, can reveal whether the animal is a herbivore, omnivore, or carnivore. Herbivores often produce pellet-shaped droppings, which can be round or elongated. Carnivores and omnivores typically leave tubular or rope-like scat, sometimes with tapered ends. The shape itself speaks to digestive efficiency and diet composition.

Colour, texture, size, location, these are all data points. And when you string enough of them together, you start seeing the story of what’s living around you.

And finally there’s a whole other game waiting out there in the bush, one that’s been played for generations. Bokdrolspoeg… But maybe thats a blog for another day

What’s the most interesting dropping you’ve spotted while out in the bush? Drop a comment below—I’d genuinely love to hear what you’ve found.