A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1367 entries
spraint
Spraint is otter dung, deposited deliberately on a conspicuous rock, log, or grass tussock beside water as a territorial and social signal rather than being hidden. It is dark, tarry, full of fish bones and scales, and it has a distinctive smell that surveyors describe as sweet, oily, or like jasmine tea, which is unusual enough to be a diagnostic character in itself.
Etymology
The word came into English from Old French and it belongs to a large body of specialized hunting vocabulary that entered English after the Norman conquest, in which nearly every quarry species had its own word for its droppings, its tracks, and its group. Fewmets for deer, crotels for hare, and spraints for otter are all from the same source, and only this one is still in working use.