I heard of people scattering lawn clippings for them. Wish I could get my extra lawn cuttings and plant trimings to where they could do some good. They all go to the city composting site. I never buy that finished compost however, because it has too much glass in it. I see my neighbors put trash in their green waste containers all the time. *sigh* How I would love to live somewhere you might actually see a deer. We don't even get squirrels. Lucky for me our possums don't eat roses. I wish we could have some rain. It has been in the 90's everyday. It's a land of make believe here. Things are green because everyone is watering. But outside the boundaries of the freeways, things are so brown and dry. My poor shrub roses are shriveled and I cut the buds off to conserve energy for the plant. I feel sorry for you and the deer at once. Wishing for a wall for you. I'd like one too, not for deer but to keep out salesmen and missionaries and a people who litter my property with flyers and cards and real estate oppertunities, etc. I must get at least 3 or4 people every day wanting me to give them money for something. I'd trade them all for deer any day.

Not to poke at you mazer, but it's not in the realm of ploopy deer scat for a ton of reasons. For one, deer are ruminants, and have a pretty complex digestive system, any pine nuts one may have eaten would have been ground in the mouth. Same would go for elk, cattle, or even a horse (which is not a ruminant). What you have there is textbook September bear poop. The "nuts" look like pinon or other pine nuts to me, but could be juniper or small acorns or some other I guess. A bear's teeth are much like a human's, and it's very common to find undigested seeds or nuts in bear poop- dead givaway. many of these specie's nuts have evolved to be passed through some digestive system or another in order to germinate. Your bear turd will make a perfect nursery for an infant connifer. The black soupy stuff that holds it all together is indicative of a good amount of protein (read M.E.A.T.) and I imagine if you'd have poked at it little more you'd have found some hair in there as a hint at what kind of critter it had been chewing on. Sound like I know a little TOO much about bear poop?? probably, I'm a game warden/ biologist and spend half my year chasing Yogi and Boo-Boo around the perifery of humanity's ever-stretching sprawl. bring in your dogfood, clean out your garbage cans, hang high your bird feeders!!

As best as I can see from the picture, it is most likely raccoon droppings. Deer scat, although similar looking, is pelletized whereas the picture above is small seeds which is indicative to raccoon scat. Also deer scat would not be in neat little piles, it would be more spread out. As coon scat dries, it breaks apart into neat little piles as in the picture. Here, the deer scat also has much larger pellets, about 1/2 inch in diameter or larger and the droppings are not that dark.

Yes indeed, my neighborhood often has "lost little pet" signs on the phone poles and I always assume a bigger critter got them (one friend watched an owl fly away with her small dog!). I always supervise my dog when out at night, and usually she only gets to go into the pool enclosure, not the whole big yard. That's partly to keep her out of a tangle with a bigger critter and partly to keep her for rousting too many bunnies, twice she's gotten the better of a bunny and I _really_ hate having to deal with that. I guess the scat was a big coon, maybe a coyote although it didn't resemble coyote poo very much. We must have a new critter around, last night something stole a large bone that the dog had left in the ivy near the house.