Hiking Through the French Alps Ignited My Love of Poop

This article originally appeared on VICE France.

It’s nightfall at the end of August and I’m somewhere in the French Alps, heading towards the summit of Peyre Eyraute, where I’ll eventually camp amongst the cows and chalets. I take a break, not to marvel at the mountain ranges lit up by the last of the day’s sun, but because I’ve noticed a poo at my feet. A small, pointed, black poo studded with purple. Intrigued by the stool, I stare at it for a while. I’m pretty sure it’s the work of a carnivore who recently ate blueberries, but I can’t identify the animal in question.

Having hiked through this part of France for around ten days now, I have to face facts – the more time I’ve spent in the mountains, the more fascinated with excrement I’ve become and it seems like all this walking is turning me into someone who really, really likes poo.

At the beginning of the trip, I only paid attention to the mounds of shit to make sure I wouldn’t step in it. But after coming across all manner of droppings — left by wild goats, cows, foxes, dogs, otters, and occasionally tourists who didn’t seem to mind taking a dump at the foot of a cairn — I’d be gripped by curiosity, dying to dissect the dried-up turd with my walking stick, hoping to reveal the secrets within.

It turned out that I wasn’t the only person with these interests. Mountain guide Sébastien Janin is just as fascinated as I am by the things animals leave behind. He works at Au Pays des Traces (“At the Land of Traces” in French), a theme park located in the heart of the Pyrenees mountains — on the southern border with Spain — which aims to introduce the public to ichnology — the science of interpreting animal tracks and traces. This, as you’d imagine, involves analysing excrement alongside scratches and other marks.

“I call it ‘poo-ology,’” Janin says. He runs me through the foundations of his area of specialist interest. “The general shapes [of the poo] tell us basic information about the animal’s diet,” he says. Herbivores have round droppings, while carnivores tend to produce elongated, pointed stools that often contain bits of bone, hair, or feathers. Omnivore shit is shaped very similar to our own. 

Another mountain guide, Corentin Esmieu, shares Janin’s enthusiasm for all things poo-ologial. “When I come across nice wolf droppings, I like to dig in,” Esmieu says. “Not when it’s fresh though because it stinks to high heaven.” 

Esmieu, who is also a photographer and is really into wolves, goes on to sing the praises of a couple of kinds of dropping he’s seen on mountainsides. “If they [wolves] have eaten a sheep, you’ll see a nice net of wool in their stools. It’s amazing. And at the moment I’m coming across a lot of wolf poo full of blueberries. It looks like pâté, like nothing else I’ve seen out here,” Esmieu said. He’s even seen a poo with a marmot leg in it before.

There’s more to ichnology than the basic identification of species. “We’re able to map out a story from it, we can see what the animal ate and when it ate it,” Janin tells me. “It also lets us think about some misconceptions we might have about certain species.” He uses bear droppings as an example, noting that in these giant stools you’re likely to find “a lot of ant shells and plant debris”, in place of the massive amounts of meat you’d expect.

Both Janin and Esmieu recommended spending more time in the field, as it were, if you were to become the poo-ologists they are. However, for the squeamish, there are other, non-invasive methods involving excrement sampling that can be deployed in service of discovering how certain species behave in certain environments.

In France, the biologists at the National Hunting and Wildlife Agency carry out tests on samples collected by people like Janin and Esmieu. The latter invokes a time when wolf poo collected from the Mercantour National Park — a French national park close to the border with Italy — and analysed by the biologists showed that the wolf in question had originally grown up in Oulx, a small town in the Piedmont region of Italy, in one of the largest packs on the border before sauntering over for a new life in France.

This is what’s so fascinating about excrement: It is the vital clue in a vaguely disgusting treasure hunt that can tell us more about the creatures we share the natural world with than we might have initially imagined. It poses questions, encourages us to look closely at our surroundings, and let’s not lie, it’s usually a thousand times easier to see than the creatures leaving it behind. It’s safer, too.