Word: guano
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Some caves are moneymaking sites for the individuals or government agencies that happen to own them. Otherwise, are caves good for anything? Some have been sources of saltpeter for munitions (Kentucky's Mammoth); others provide guano fertilizer from bat droppings (100,000 tons still lie in New Mexico's Carlsbad), cool storage for beer and cheese, ready-made railroad tunnels (for the Southern Railway in Virginia), chicken pens with below hen-killing summer temperatures, cesspools for at least five Pennsylvania towns, factories for moonshiners and counterfeiters, prisons (Marvel Cave, Mo.), natural air conditioning for surface buildings. Kentucky...
About eight years ago, the company decided that lack of food is not the factor that limits guano bird population. The cold Pacific off Peru is incredibly rich in life; besides such large items as tuna and whale, it contains about 25 million tons of anchovetas, the six-inch fish that is the favorite food of the birds. The company decided that the chief reason why the birds did not increase to the limit of their abundant food supply was that their small islands were overcrowded and not in the right places for harvesting fish efficiently. The birds cannot normally...
...small peninsulas where a few birds alight occasionally. The guards shot predators such as foxes and condors, drove away egg-stealing humans. The birds responded at once by accepting the protected peninsulas as artificial islands. They came by thousands, then by millions, and settled down to fishing and producing guano...
Cash Value. The company looks on its birds as cheap and willing workers for the national good. Each guanay, it figures, eats 240 lbs. of anchovetas a year, processing its catch into 33 lbs. of guano. Twenty-two of the 33 lbs. is harvestable; the rest is lost, mostly at sea. The cash value of each bird's annual production is $1.04, and the company is the guardian of 30 million birds...
...spite of its present success, the company never forgets the catastrophe that hit the birds in 1942. A warm current called El Niño* crept down the coast of Peru. It drove the anchovetas away and starved millions of guano birds. Next time, the company intends to have a chain of walled-off peninsulas all the way to Chile. Then the birds can fly south by easy hops, and escape death-dealing...