Word: guano
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...bird islands off the coast of Peru are more than a fabulous sight to tourists. The birds are among Peru's chief assets: last year they produced fertilizer (guano) worth more than $30 million. Their value is on the increase because the Peruvian government's Guano Administration Co. has recently encouraged the birds to colonize the mainland. According to Ornithologist Robert Cushman Murphy of New York's American Museum of Natural History, the company's management of the birds is one of the world's greatest examples of practical conservation...
...sugar cane, ripens grapes for Peru's famed pisco brandy, grows the fine, long-staple cotton that is king of the country's exports. The Humboldt Current cools the whole coast, and as a crowning convenience serves up the anchovies that feed the seabirds that provide the guano (droppings) used to fertilize the soil. In the coastal north are oilfields that make Peru an oil exporter (though output is dropping...
Near Tucson. Ariz., two Boy Scouts found a cave with seven human skulls covered with bat guano. Just to be safe, they told both the sheriff and the archaeologists. The skulls proved to be intermediate between crime and science: a few hundred years old. José Abeyta, head of the council of San Juan Pueblo, turned up a Spanish helmet from the days of the early conquerors...
...William Russell Grace a refugee from the Irish potato famine and a partner in a small ship chandler's store seven miles from Lima, Peru, changed trades. He decided that he could make more money selling guano fertilizer (bird droppings) than from ship supplies He was right. By the time he died in 1904. his W. R. Grace & Co. was a multimillion-dollar empire whose ship lines, sales agencies, railroads and import-export business touched almost every town and hamlet along South America's west coast...
Last week the migration was proceeding with hardly a casualty. Some 20 million guano birds are already established in their new quarters. Peruvians hope they will stay there permanently, out of reach of the warm-water cycle, and repay the thoughtful company with guano...