Finding a white splatter on a rock along the shore or on your car is a normal find when birds are active in your area. These white splatters are from birds visiting and pooping on those surfaces, which may be enough knowledge for some – but the mystery absolutely does not have to stop there! If you are a nature sleuth like me, you may want to know how to identify the bird that made the scat. The first observation is to determine whether the splat has a tubular structure to it or if it is a uric splat.
A uric splat is a type of runny bird defecation characterized by having little to no solid material. It appears as a bright white fluid with small traces of black/brown semi-solids, but with no real structure. These scats are primarily composed of uric acid. (1)
Humans release their nitrogenous waste primarily in the form of urea which gets exited from the body through urine. In birds, nitrogenous waste exits alongside their scat (poop) in the form of uric acid. (2) The uric acid is what gives the scat the bright white color associated with bird poop. (3)
Most people are probably familiar with owl pellets – these are dense regurgitated balls from the bird’s crop (the first organ in a bird’s digestive system), filled with hair and bones from the prey of the owl. This is a byproduct of digestion and is separate from a scat. Pellets are released from the bird’s beak after all of the digestible material from their prey gets processed, and the bird needs to make room for new food in it’s crop. The owl will “vomit” the pellet out below a perch, roost, or some other resting spot. (4) Less commonly known is that there are many different birds that make pellets and it is typically pellet-producing birds that make uric splats!
The reason the pellet-producing-birds make uric splats is simply because they have less solid material that ends up in their scat because most of the solids came out as a pellet! Birds that make pellets, and therefore uric splats, include owls, hawks, corvids (ex. crows, ravens, and jays), gulls, herons, egrets, cormorants, terns, and many shorebirds. (5)
Uric Spray
A uric spray is a specific type of uric splat that is associated with hawks and falcons. Unlike owls, hawks and falcons will lean over – raise their tail and launch their scat in a projectile. This will appear as a line of small splatters rather than a typical uric splat as you would see in an owl. (6)
When analyzing scat around a kill site or off a perch, look for differences in how it was released to determine whether it was a hawk or an owl that made the scat.
