Know what this is?

If you guessed "a bag of shit," you win the prize.

But in polite circles, we call that a bag of "scat."

Hand picked, even. Each little turd, er... pellet, carefully selected.

Really.

Juan Valdez has nothing on me. Although I suspect a brew from his beans would taste much better than mine.

Winter is over, and spring is here. The elk left the winter range long ago (somewhen between the 5th and the 12th). And now that the snow is all gone, one of the researchers assisting in investigating our mysterious elk malady decides it would probably be a good idea to have a fecal sample from the antelope on the winter range.

One reason, I assume, is on the off chance that there might be something obvious that is in the elk diets, but not eaten by the antelope. A perfectly reasonable request, but it would have been a whole lot easier to honor back when the land was covered with snow. Then you know roughly when the pellets were deposited, and if you're really fussy and patient, you can sit there watching an antelope herd until, you know, a bunch of them have done their business. Then you trot over and grab up fresh, greenish samples that are still a little slimy.

Not that one necessarily likes their fecal collections (No, no google hits coming here. Got that turned off, now. Thank you Melissa, Morgan and Trinity.) green, soft and slimy, but that way, you at least know for sure that what you've got came out of an antelope, and will tell you what that antelope had been eating. And within the past few days.

Now, with no snow on the ground, and the pronghorn dispersed across the countryside in small, skittish little groups, that doesn't work.

You have to wander over the ground looking for previously deposited piles of pronghorn poop, trying to guess if it was deposited in winter, and not fall.

Now, the wildlife literature has within it scientific references and studies on how to recognize the fecal droppings of different species.

Really. There's even field guides on it.

But I've looked at a fair amount of this stuff, and I gotta tell you this. It ain't that predictable. Yes, there are pellets out there that quite obviously came from an elk. And others that are obviously pronghorn. But there are those few, maybe the standard guestimated 10-20 percent, that could be from either one.

So, yesterday I opted to make it my task to find some of those winter pronghorn poops, before the spring thaw soaked them into becoming soil, or before they became contaminated with pellets from spring, which should have different plants in them.

But I had to make sure I selected the right little pellets. And thought there might be some out there who wish to learn this professional skill.

So first off, something a little obvious.

This,

is not from an antelope. It's not even elk.

It's from a horse. The proverbial "road apples", although there is no road. We don't want that.

These,

although smaller, are not antelope, either. They've from an elk, and they're all over the winter range. Wanted to avoid them in my samples. You'll notice that these, like the "classic" elk pellets, all tend to be a little flattened, on one or more sides. Like marshmallows that have been packed at the bottom of the food basket.

Elk pellets also often come out in lumps, sorta like logs of partially digested vegetation. Makes them easier to pick out.

What we're looking for is these:

Small little, roundish turds, often with a little point on one end.

Like a rounded chocolate chip. These are probably from an antelope (But only because I'm not collecting in what one would consider deer habitat. Find these up on the rocky hills, and you'd be hard pressed to be certain which species they came from.)

Then there's that small, but not too small, minority of fecal pellet groups that doesn't fall clearly under one species or the other.

These I left out of the sample.

And someone out there should be asking, what do you put in the sample? How many grocery bags of this stuff do you need?

Answer?

Not much.

Unless they changed it, and nobody has told me they did since I first got into this 27 or 28 years ago, the standard norm for professional pellet pickers is two pellets each from at least 25 pellet groups. The basic idea is, with ruminants like antelope, deer and elk, the plant parts have been churning in their gut, being digested by the symbiotic microbes, for some time before the hardened undigested parts are worked out of the system. So each little pellet is a pretty good blended sample of what went in. Get a duplicate from each group, and samples from 25 groups or so, and you've got a representative sample of what the whole herd of critters had been feeding on.

'Course, you also gotta have a good handle on what a "pellet group" is.

Some are just plain obvious.

Clearly, an ungulate stopped here, lifted their tail, did their business, and moved on.

But some are in such a hurry to get somewhere, they kind of let things fall out as they may.

To do it proper, you want to keep an eye out for these dribble piles so that you don't sample the same animal's droppings twice. (Not that it would be a crisis if you did since, as I said, each little pellet is a pretty blended sample.)

And that, my friends, is how I and the heeler sisters spent part of yesterday morning.