Poop, Pee and Carbon Dating

For a number of years, I’ve led an autumn nature writing workshop at different locations in the high desert. They’ve been held at ranches in Crook County, including the Rafter Q, where I used to live and ranch, and at the historic GI Ranch next door, where the springs that create the headwaters of the South Fork of the Crooked River bubble up from the desert floor. These three-day writing intensives have also been staged at PLAYA, an artist and scientist residency campus this side of Paisley and at the Malheur Field Station in Princeton, Oregon. Though originally a biological field station, since the 1980s the 320-acre station has been run by The Great Basin Society. This year, for the second time, the retreat will base out of The Lodge at Summer Lake, a rustic gem located across from the entrance to the 30 square miles of marshland that make up the Summer Lake Wildlife Refuge.

These retreats are as much about nature (who we are as part of it, our moment in its time) as about writing. Though the classroom in this case is the high desert, really any savannah, rain forest, or fjord would do. The goal is to surrender to a landscape. Each year the long weekend includes two field trips. One is led by Dennis Jenkins, senior research archaeologist for Oregon’s Museum of Natural and Cultural History, who provides a Cook’s Tour of excavation sites at the Paisley Caves, once home to Pleistocene peoples living on the shore of the high desert’s inland sea. The Pied Piper of the second is Jon Nelson, curator of wildlife at the High Desert Museum, who introduces participants to the chirping, burbling, howling and sprouting miracles that call the high desert home.

What bird, for example, would you say is superintelligent? It’s one of Nelson’s favorites. Nope, not the wise old owl whose eyes, it turns out, are bigger than their brains. It’s the turkey vulture. It definitely doesn’t win any beauty contests, but is on par with the smartest dogs, has super-powered vision and sense of smell and the weirdest self-defense system ever.

Known as “nature’s clean-up crew,” vultures eat carrion. They can smell it from eight miles away, see it from four. They fly low so they can detect the gases produced by the early stages of decay in dead animals. They do the world a service by eating dead carcasses often infected with deadly diseases (anthrax, rabies) which would poison other carrion-feeding species but which the vulture can stomach. And get this! The vulture’s method of self-defense is to vomit on their enemy, sending their most recent rancid, putrid meal sailing as far as 10 feet and burning their attacker’s skin and eyes with their gastric juices that are as acidic as battery acid. Turkey vultures also defecate and urinate on their legs and feet to cool them in hot weather or to disinfect them after standing on grody carcasses.

Another featured attraction in the Refuge is the ungainly looking sandhill crane, a distant relative of the vulture. It not only looks prehistoric, it is prehistoric. Carbon-dated fossilized evidence ranks it as one of the oldest existing bird species — dating back millions of years.

Millions of years? That makes the prehistoric artifacts Dr. Jenkins and his fellow archaeologists have unearthed seem brand new. The Paisley Caves produced evidence of human existence 13,000 years ago. More recently, the Connely Caves generated artifacts from 17,000 years back. How can scientists be so sure about what these discoveries describe and their chronologies? Poop, pee and carbon dating to the rescue! The coprolites (or paleofeces) fossilized in ancient pack rat midden inside the caves provides the who, what, where and why. Carbon dating establishes the when.

It’s hard not to wonder what our unearthed fossilized selves will describe. A weekend spent contemplating sandhill cranes and vultures that have watched species come and go, land forms drastically change, waterways vanish; or prehistoric peoples who didn’t survive those dramatic changes; or us, doing what we’re doing in our allotted time and wondering if how we got “here” is the best way to get “there” (it’s not)… could get a person down.

But it doesn’t. Nature’s moment to moment exuberance, hullabaloo and sense of humor snaps us out of our navel gazing, gets us over ourselves, reminds us to laugh at the whole, incomprehensible miracle and mess. As to carbon dating and humor, for comic relief from whatever ails you, check out Andy Huggins https://www.oldmanhuggins.com/, a septuagenarian comedian. “I joined a dating site for people my age called carbon dating. I asked a woman on the site for her number. She told me it was 140 over 95.”

This article appears in the Source September 25, 2025.