Squirrel Poop

Okay, I have been obsessing about squirrel poop all weekend. For the past 20 years I have lived in a pine forest. My property supports mabe 50 (?) squirrels. Saturday it occured to me that I had never seen squirrel poop and I had no idea what it looked like! See, if I had 50 rabbits living in my yard, I would see clear piles of rabbit poop. But the squirrels? Nothing.

Why are there no little piles of poop under the pine trees? Certain favored trees have a regular litter of pine cone bits underneath - clearly the squirrels are eating lots of roughage. Where does it go? Even in the winter, when we get a fresh coating of white snow it will remain unsullied by squirrel droppings, week after week.

How can this be? What if their poop is so cleverly camoflaged that I can't tell it's poop? Maybe all these years my children have been playing in piles of squirrel poop that looks like grass. Maybe we have sat on the ground and eaten cheese sandwich picnics right on top of squirrel poop disguised as pine needles! If it is that invisible and I have 50 squirrels in my backyard it seems inevitable that I have been living in a pile of poop all these years!

So this morning I started Googling squirrel poop. I found some images and also ran across this theory in Wiki's uncyclopedia:

"Due to a total lack of witnesses, scientists are led to believe that squirrel poop does not exist or rather, does not exist outside of the squirrels body. The theory states that magic causes waste to disappear as it meets the end of the large intestine. While most are convinced that after this stage it completely disappears, others believe that it could actually be teleported to either another dimension, or the ingredients bay of Slim Jim factories. UPDATE: Squirrel poop does exist. It looks like little pellets, much like a rabbit's, only a bit less firm and more brown. This was discovered when one of our operatives mistook some of the rodent droppings for chocolate candy (yuck!!!) Yet another mystery of the universe solved."

Now my main worry is: how much squirrel poop have my children eaten, thinking it was funny chocolate jelly beans?