Whose scat is that?

Hi! Can you help me identify this? I found it a few days ago in my backyard field, and assume it's scat, though I can't find anything like it online. (I might have seen this in my yard about 4 years ago.)
I live in Madison, OH, on 5 acres in an area of fields and dense woods. A tributary creek from Arcola Creek runs across the back. We see a good variety of Ohio wildlife.
The pile is easily the size of an open hand. If you zoom in, you can see another piece to the right.

This was a tricky one!

We pride ourselves on knowing our scat, but your animal-droppings question almost had us stumped.

The consensus from naturalists Andy “Number One at Number Two” Avram and John “Dr. Scat” Kolar is that this is probably deer scat, just in an uncommon form.

Typically, when deer have been browsing on leaves and twigs, their scat takes the form of discrete “pellets.” (The parallels to Raisinets candy are rather precise.)

However, when deer have been eating more grasses, weeds and forbs, their scat can take on a stringier shape, with each bolus connected by fibers to its neighbors in an (ahem) necklace-like configuration. (We think that’s what’s in your photo.)

Naturalist Karie “The Droppings Whisperer” Wheaton notes that this type of scat also gives you an X-ray-like image of the deer’s intestines.

When they’re freshly deposited, even pellet-like scat can still sometimes retain this shape, like a mass of garlic-clove-shaped boluses joined end-to-end, as you can see in this stock photo:

That might have been more information about scat than you wanted, but it’s a fascinating opportunity to learn about Nature.  Thanks for sharing your observation!

– Geauga Park District’s Naturalist Team (written up by Naturalist Chris Mentrek)