Chupacrabra, Sasquatch or ....?

We recently spent a weekend at our “vacation house” (the nice way of saying we have two mortgages right now) where we met St. Pauli Girl's brother and sister-in-law. After a bit of conversation, her brother said, “I don't mean to alarm you, but you might have a chupacabra living here.”

He then took us to the backyard where to put it simply, some animal had turned a small area of the lawn into its personal litter box. We were all puzzled as none of us could think of an animal that would do something like that in the same spot (well except for cats and litter boxes but that's only because the cats force their human pets to clean up after them.)

But I immediately got excited because I realized I now had to go to a town hall meeting of the “Finding Bigfoot” crew to report these findings. I decided I would wait and let them bag the evidence themselves. I could already imagine Matt or Bobo talking about this amazing find:

“We were skeptical of the story at first but when you have hard or maybe squishy evidence like this, you can't ignore it. I've never seen Bigfoot dung but I have no reason to believe this wasn't Bigfoot dung. So as an experiment, we had Bobo take a dump and then compared it with the Bigfoot dung. They weren't close at all. That's when I knew we had some credible Bigfoot evidence.”

My mind came back to reality as we all discussed possibilities. Since all of the droppings were beneath trees, I reasoned that it had to be a bird like a hawk or owl. Everyone seemed skeptical until I told the story of my golfing experience a few years ago when I saw a Mississippi kite getting terrorized by two smaller birds and well, those birds literally scared the crap out of that kite. And I'm glad I wasn't standing any closer as the pile would have been large enough for rave laughs in an Adam Sandler movie.

Luckily in this modern day and age, we can answer any question via the internet. I queried “owl droppings” which revealed a whole page of pictures which really didn't seem to match what we had seen. Next I searched for “hawk droppings” which brought up more pictures plus the heartwarming story of a hawk dropping a miracle puppy from the sky. At this point, I became convinced the droppings had not come from a bird. So I entered my next query, “lot of poop in a small area” which brought up a page full of results. After a quick glance, I changed the query to “lot of animal poop in a small area.” Lo and behold, I found an animal forum where someone had the exact same situation in his yard.

I quickly went through the answers, sorting out the the far fetched (“bears or otters”) from the smart ass (“I consider myself wild”) to the most likely (“Sasquatch”). I had Bobo on speed dial when I realized the consensus of the answers was racoons. Apparently this is how raccoons roll and raccoon latrines are very common as well as a serious health hazard. I just wish I had found all of this info before we left the vacation house. Instead I get to spend the next few weeks imagining a party of raccoons talking in Adam Sandler and Rob Schneider voices, “Hey, watch this!”

Meanwhile, every time I do a new internet query, I get pestered with ads like “still looking for poop?” or “click here for more poop pictures” or “history of the poop deck webpage.”