Bear scat, also known as bear poop, is the feces of bears. It can be found in the wild and is often used by researchers to study the diet and behavior of bears. Here are some key characteristics of bear scat:

• Shape and size: Black bear scat is tubular like human feces but larger, measuring 5 to 12 inches long and 1.5 to 2.5 inches wide. It may appear as a loose "cowpile" when the bear is feeding heavily on fruits and berries. Grizzly bear scat is fibrous and tubular when the bear is consuming vegetation in the spring and early summer. The scat can turn black, moist, and smelly when the bear turns to meat as a food source and globular when consuming berries.

• Contents: Black bear scat is usually filled with vegetation and insect parts in the spring and early summer. When berry season hits, scat is deposited as loose blobs that are filled with berries and seeds. Grizzly bear scat can contain the carcasses of moose, mountain goats, elk, sheep, and other animals, along with plants, roots, berries, and tubers. Fish fragments can also be found in the scat of coastal brown bears.

• Smell: Black bear scat does not have an unpleasant smell if the bears ate only fruit, nuts, acorns, or vegetation. In those cases, the scats smell like a slightly fermented version of whatever the bear ate. Scats that contain meat or garbage smell somewhat foul but nothing like the feces of dogs, cats, or primates.

Bear scat can reveal what bears ate. In addition to the smell, researchers look for seeds, leaf fragments, insect parts, hairs, bone fragments, scales, etc. to learn about bear diets. Sometimes finding matching items takes close observation, forcing a person to learn details of vein patterns in leaves and exactly what different kinds of seeds or hairs or insects look like. Blood tests showed that researchers who had handled bear scats for decades were negative for any of the contagious microorganisms some carnivore droppings do.