Bear? That's the closest to human scat I've seen. A good sized bear leaves an impressive pile. Check for berry seeds in season. Hair in the scat could be bear but is more often fox or coyote. Bears rummage and turn things over, smaller critturs poke and pry. Large cats are rare in towns and cities. Bear scat tends to be squarish and canines and cats are more often tapered. Cats will usually scratch around their scat and cover it if they can. Probably more than you wanted to know ... :-)M

Yes, if it's scat, it must have been quite a party, lol! I did do a web-search before posting the original message and didn't find any pictures of anything both the same shape and size. Whatever is causing it must be coming around at night, because this is right out in the open next to a path I use several times a day and I think I'd notice if something was sitting there for any length of time. I just tried smooshing some of this stuff up to see what it's made of...looks like soil particles to me. And there is a burrow right at the edge of one of these piles of pellets. It's about 1/4" diameter and goes down under the pellets as far as I could reach with a car key. I'd like to think that it's from an earthworm, but I hardly ever find any in my soil...unfortunately.

I do know it's not squirrel. Squirrels leave pellets like mice and rabbits. It could be either the skunk or the opossum, as they both eat berries. What you are seeing are the seeds from the berries. It sadly looks like the critter left you a "present" on a nice piece of outdoor furniture in the second picture.

Don't know what you might have in your yard in the way of fruiting trees, etc., but right now I am being constantly bombarded by hackberry 'poopies'. They look quite a lot like the actual fruit and at times it's almost like it's hailing little brownish red morsels from on high. We have several mature hackberry trees in the yard, one being right over the front steps. THe first to arrive were the waxwings, a fairly large bunch of about 20. It was hard not to notice them with all the trilling calls and the patter of berries (and berry by-product) hitting the ground. That afternoon the same tree hosted a flock of bluebirds, robins and more waxwings all at the same time. Lots of rivalry going on--never realized how dominating a robin could be . The trees are loaded this year so there is plenty for all , at least for now. Things will change later on in the winter after the easy stuff is gone. Course, if our temps stay 30 degrees above normal like we are now, that will ease the strain a bit.