Word: guano
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Texan who had been banding bats went partially blind, had convulsive seizures when he tried to drink water, and soon died. Rabies virus was found in his brain. In 1959 a California mining engineer who had been searching caves in Mexico and Texas for deposits of bat guano got sick and died after suffering nausea, hydrophobia, foaming at the mouth and extreme anxiety-the characteristic symptoms of rabies. Both men were sure that no bat had bitten them...
...crawled into a den of hibernating bears and took the rectal temperature of the biggest one while pacifying the restive animal with lumps of sugar. But for his new job he needed more equanimity than ever. Bat caves are chambers of horror. Their floors are deep in stinking guano and littered with the skulls and bones of long-dead bats. Over this repulsive carpet crawl fierce, flesh-eating dermestid beetles and their larvae-so numerous that the floor seems alive. When a sick or senile bat falls from the ceiling, the beetles crowd to devour it. The walls are thick...
...back to the original Spanish conquest of Central America in the 16th century. Every few years (most recently in 1957), Honduras renews its claim with a polite, formal note to Washington. The State Department as politely rejects it, pointing out that the islands were first settled by a Brooklyn guano firm in 1857. In 1904 a Boston syndicate, grandly titled the Swan Islands Commercial and General Trading Co., bought the place to harvest coconuts and tropical woods, but lost money steadily through the years. Amateur explorers pitted the islands in unsuccessful hunts for buried pirate gold...
Much can be said of Fidel Castro's wild schemes, but no one can accuse him of lacking imagination. In the high name of the revolution last week Castro nationalized 1) Cuba's bat guano caves, 2) every chicken egg in Havana province and 3) Santa Claus, who has gradually become the symbol of Christmas through much of Latin America...
Havana's egg business became exclusive property of the National Institute of Agrarian Reform (INRA) because Castro is upset about overproduction and a drastic drop in prices. Farmers must sell their eggs at dictated prices to INRA, which will hold back part of the crop from market. Bat guano is an even more ambitious INRA undertaking, first sparked by Entrepreneur Bud Arvey (son of Chicago Democratic Bigwig Jake Arvey), who hit Cuba last spring with a plan to join the Castro government in a $500,000 partnership to scrape the guano deposits from caves in Pinar...