One can dream but there's not all that much of the stuff left.
As with whale oil, it is a natural resource we came closest to running out of.
And as with whale oil, substitutions save the day.
Almost everyone, at some point in their life, has had a bird poop on their head. It’s gross. But it can also be taken as good luck, particularly if it’s a seabird splat—that shit is worth serious money.
Farmers in South America and a few other places have long used the nutrient-rich substance, called guano, as fertilizer. And it turns out that seabirds excrete up to almost US $474-million worth of the stuff per year worldwide, according to a new study. The authors see this finding as a perfect public relations opportunity for seabird services.
“We wanted to inform the general public about the importance of seabirds and the value they provide for humans,” says Daniel Plazas Jimenez, a PhD candidate at the Federal University of Goiás in Brazil who studies food chains and coauthored the paper, published in Trends in Ecology & Evolution. But the value that seabirds provide to world ecosystems is much greater, Jimenez adds—a powerful argument for seabird preservation.
Species like gulls and pelicans nest on islands along the Peruvian and Chilean coasts, mounding the rocks with their droppings. A lot of this guano stays in place due to the region’s extremely arid climate, so the droppings attract local harvesters who scrape it off with shovels and sell it as organic fertilizer to farmers. But some guano flushes into the sea, depositing phosphorus and nitrogen. These chemical elements fuel the growth of phytoplankton, which feeds a variety of marine species, from snails to fish that humans eat.
When this guano deposition occurs near coral reefs, it can boost the reefs’ fish stocks by up to 48 percent. According to a 2016 estimate from the United Nations World Ocean Assessment, the annual net global economic return of commercial fisheries on coral reefs is $6.8-billion. If just 10 percent of coral reefs’ fish stocks depend on guano nutrients—a conservative estimate, according to the Brazilian team—that’s $650-million a year. Combined with seabirds’ annual fertilizer output, that adds up to over a billion dollars.
The Goiás scientists are only the latest in a long line of people who have prized bird poop. The ancient civilizations that lived along the South American Pacific coast used guano for agriculture for over 4,000 years, says ornithologist Pedro Rodrigues, who wrote a paper on the subject. The Inca, for example, harvested guano with boats, then carried it up to farmlands in the Andes on llama caravans—all the way up to Machu Picchu. One of the Inca’s much-venerated goddesses was Urpi Huachac, “the Lady of Guano.”....
....MUCH MORE
The Allure of Guano
New York Guano
"Guano Mania"
Today In Guano
We have an odd fascination with guano.
Let me rephrase that.
From Law 360:
Judge Kills Suit Seeking $213M On 140-Year-Old Guano Notes
