Word: guano
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...place to go, no work to do. Physical labor is a status symbol that an Enu pays to perform. An Enu need not raise a sweat even for food. The natives and their inadvertent guests eat excrement processed to look like conventional food. Ambrosia comes from the sewers. Guano is refined to an elixir of life...
Terres also explores the arcane richness of animal behavior and man's beliefs about it. Ibis guano, the reader learns, enriches the ecology of the Everglades by increasing plankton growth; a loon can be imitated on the ocarina; geese occasionally become homosexual, pair-bonding for life even when heterosexual partners are present; an auk's egg is a marvel of engineering, shaped so that it will not roll from its cliff-edge nest...
...thing, there are no permanent residents. Other Indian Ocean islands can boast of native Maldivians, Seychellois, Mauritians or Malagasy. The only permanent Tromelinians are sea turtles and terns and the larger frigate sea birds, whose droppings until 1956 were harvested as the island's principal resource, guano for fertilizer. A small, transient French colony operating meteorological instruments and a radio transmitter is stationed there to forecast weather conditions for larger islands as well as for commercial airliners passing overhead...
...Last year, after learning that France intended to cultivate the Tromelin turtles for soup and tortoise shells, Sir Seewoosagur handed a note to his French ambassador reaffirming Mauritian sovereignty. Among other "proofs," the Prime Minister cited some unique documents that the World Court may be called on to examine: guano-gathering permits issued between 1901 and 1956 refer to the bird-bedecked island as a dependency of Mauritius...
...author goes on to describe how the birds who made their nests along the coast provided guano deposits so that a suitable loam was established for wild grasses to grow. Sir Guy concludes: "Thus eventually the whole of these areas became grass-covered, from the coarse marram on the exposed dunes, ridges, and hillocks and the finer bents and fescues in the sheltered dunes, gullies, and hollows, to the meadow grasses round and about the river estuaries and the mouths of the streams and burns. Out of the spreading and intermingling of all these grasses which followed was established...