Cottage Life

Seed sorting, HST rebate rule & ice info

WHAT POOP IS THIS?

When we opened the cottage, I found these pellets—a little smaller than orange seeds—under a couch cushion and in some bedding. Which creature would leave poop like this?—EMILY CRETZMAN, PIGEON LAKE, ONT.

No creature. Because that’s not poop. “They are definitely seeds,” says James Eckenwalder, a botanist and the author of Conifers of the World. But we can’t blame you for not being able to ID them. No one we asked—at the Canadian Museum of Nature, the Arboretum at the University of Guelph, or the UBC botanical garden—was able to either. Not conclusively. There are almost 400,000 species of plants in the world, and a whole bunch of them have seeds. Even if we narrow this down to cottage country, “there are a number of totally unrelated possible IDs,” says Eckenwalder.

Of course, a creature may still be responsible

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