Bird Scat Identification: Droppings, Urates and Pellets

Bird scat is usually a small dark, brown or green deposit that is capped, streaked or ringed with chalky white. The white part is uric acid: Wikipedia explains that birds and reptiles excrete uric acid with their feces as a dry mass rather than as liquid urine. Mammals pass urine separately, so their scat has no white cap. That single feature is why the Internet Center for Wildlife Damage Management's scat key puts all birds under white feces.

What else to note:

• Color of the dark part. Diet shows through. ICWDM notes goose droppings are usually green, from grazing.
• Size and quantity. A few small splashes under a perch point to songbirds; many large tubular droppings on a lawn by water point to geese. See Canada goose scat and wild turkey scat and tracks.
• Place. Streaks down a wall or on the ground under a roost, ledge or nest tell you where to look up.

A gray, furry lump full of small bones is usually not scat at all but a pellet, regurgitated through the mouth. Wikipedia describes pellets as the undigested parts of a bird's food, such as insect exoskeletons, bones, fur, feathers, plant matter, bills, claws and teeth, formed in the gizzard within 6 to 10 hours of eating. Hawk and owl pellets are grey or brown, spherical to oblong, and one to two inches long from large birds; songbird pellets are much smaller.

The Wildlife Trusts gives the quickest test: owl pellets can look like animal droppings, but they do not smell, and they gradually turn grey as they dry.

Pellets are not only from owls. Wikipedia lists hawks, eagles, herons, cormorants, grebes, kingfishers, terns, gulls, crows, jays, shrikes, swallows, dippers and shorebirds. A pellet with fish bones found near water may be from one of the fish-eating birds on that list.

Wikipedia also notes owl pellets can carry viable rodent viruses and bacteria, which is why classroom pellets are sterilized. Do not pull apart a pellet you found outside with bare hands.

If there is no white part, it is almost certainly a mammal. Start with shape: pellets, tubes, twisted ropes or plops, as our animal poop identification chart explains, then contents and placement. Two common backyard answers:

• Fox. Wildlife Illinois says fox droppings are similar to coyote droppings but smaller, and that they may contain bone, fur, feathers or seeds depending on diet. Feathers in a scat with no white cap point to a predator such as a fox that has eaten a bird, not to a bird. See red fox scat and tracks.
• Raccoon. Repeated piles in one spot on a deck, roof or woodpile are usually a raccoon latrine; see raccoon scat and tracks and the latrine cleanup precautions on the chart page.

The CDC explains that histoplasmosis comes from breathing in spores of Histoplasma, a fungus that lives in soil and spreads in bird and bat droppings mixed into soil, particularly in the central and eastern United States. Symptoms usually appear 3 to 17 days after breathing in the fungus. The CDC's prevention guidance:

• Activities that raise exposure include cleaning chicken coops, exploring caves, cleaning, remodeling or tearing down old buildings, landscaping, farming, gardening and yard work.
• Large amounts of bird or bat droppings should be cleaned up by professional companies that specialize in hazardous waste removal.
• Workers can wear protective masks such as N95s.
• People with weakened immune systems, including those with HIV/AIDS, organ transplant recipients and people taking corticosteroids or TNF inhibitors, as well as adults over 55 and infants, should take extra care.

ICWDM's own warning applies to any droppings: avoid handling them without protection and avoid breathing near them. For a small splash on a car or a step, wear gloves and wash your hands afterward. If you develop a cough, fever or other pneumonia-like symptoms after cleaning out droppings, tell a doctor about the exposure; the CDC advises asking about testing for histoplasmosis if you live in or have traveled to an area where the fungus lives.

NatureLens can suggest what left a dropping or pellet from a photo, with free scans every day. Scat changes with diet more than most signs, so give it the best record you can: a top-down photo with a coin or ruler for scale, a side view, and a wider shot of the place, such as a perch, ledge, lawn or trail. Say where you found it, and check the answer against the features on this page.

Research and drafting for this page used AI assistance. Every measurement, date, price and claim was then checked against the sources listed below, which were opened and read on 2026-09-25. Where two sources give different numbers, both are shown.