What could have produced this?

When topping up my bird feeder, I could not help but notice this somewhat gargantuan poo by the feeder's pole. About the most exciting large birds I see around our garden in Finchampstead are Buzzards, Red Kites and the odd Carrion Crow.  Can't say I've seen any gulls or large geese that might produce this. Only the normal wood pigeons.

It certainly impressed me. Don't fancy it on my car's windscreen.

  • Unknown said:

    When topping up my bird feeder, I could not help but notice this somewhat gargantuan poo by the feeder's pole. About the most exciting large birds I see around our garden in Finchampstead are Buzzards, Red Kites and the odd Carrion Crow.  Can't say I've seen any gulls or large geese that might produce this. Only the normal wood pigeons.

    It certainly impressed me. Don't fancy it on my car's windscreen.

    Something I've not seen for too many years, a worm cast...….

  • Mike b,

    good suggestion, as you say we don't see so many these days, could well be. Well done.

  • Not normally a poo fanatic, I was sufficiently intrigued by this mighty effort to go off and research t'internet.

    One surprise immediately came up...

    Searching over the internet didn't throw up anything definite.  About the most promising suggestion: Wood Pigeon. In one posting somewhere, the author said they had seen a Wood Pigeon produce a prodigious amount of poop, aimed at the head of another Wood Pigeon!

    Other more tenuous suggestions included dove, Hedgehog or Pheasant. I am somewhat dubious about these.

  • Interesting, we keep getting this poo. It's on the patio slabs under our porch roof in Wokingham so it must be a bird sitting on the porch supports. The common birds in our garden are red kites, pigeon, magpie, starlings, jays, woodpecker. And we also hear an owl.
  • I'm late to the party, but this is likely pigeon or dove poo. I find several of these in my yard every day where I feed the neighborhood birds. The area where 3 types of doves (Mourning, white-winged and Eruasian Collared) and some Gambel's Quails congregate to eat is where I find these large specimens. Pigeons and doves are part of the same family, Columbidae.

  • Hello, even later here. Today we saw for the first time a couple of specimens of droppings in our garden (suburban, N Yorks) which exactly match Angus's images - and are equally large.

    They appeared during the day, so mammals seem unlikely.
    I am all too familiar with wood pigeon droppings (having scraped them off shoes, cars etc too many times) and these are not they.
    We get the occasional collared dove, and have seen one recently, so this is a possibility, but I would have expected their droppings to be more similar to those of wood pigeons - as Sparzdos says, they are in the same family.
    So I'm still wondering - any more suggestions?
  • I have just found something very similar and your photos are the only ones I can find that are similar. Have concluded a bird but not clear what. This was in my tarmac driveway, three piles v close together. Would have required the bird to stand still for quite a while I suspect!

  • Snap! We just found several piles of strange long thin curly brown poop in our garden this morning (rural Central Scotland backing onto woodland) and these are the only photos I can find to match. 

    We regularly have squirrels, rabbits, foxes, badgers and deer, but I concluded it was probably bird due to being close to house and since it has the big white splodge (technical term) at one end, so matches the OP photos exactly.

    We do also get buzzards (seen again this morning) and the occasional spotted woodpecker landing in the garden. I even looked at worm castings (on monoblock nowhere near lawn) but nothing I can find matches... apart from these photos.

    On closer inspection I couldn't find any traces of animal/beastie parts within.

    Did you ever get a conclusive ID?

  • P.s. for scale you can see it's almost the size of short side of monoblock brick (100mm), so pile is around 90mm long but poop itself is much longer, curled around on itself.
  • Just a note that the doves don't always poop like this. Sometimes it's a drop. Sometimes it is little ringlets. And sometimes it's what you see in these photos. The white on the poop is the giveaway that it is a bird. Birds poop and pee at the same time. The white part is the pee and the darker part is the poop. Since I stopped feeding the doves for the summer, the big droppings have disappeared.

    I have Gila Woodpeckers, Guilded Flickers, Black-headed Grosbeaks, Cactus Wren, various Finches and Sparrows, Hooded and Bullock's Orioles, Roadrunners, Great-tailed Grackles, Verdin, Anna and Costa's Hummingbirds and more. (Can you tell I live in the SW United States?) I only see these poops when the doves are around.

    I love all of the comments. I have only become a bird person over the last year and having a great time with it.