Working on a boat in the Everett marina I've been enjoying watching nature's wonders as usual. One of these wonders is the Cormorant, in this case Double-crested, which is the most common diving bird in the marina that I've seen lately.

These birds are very successful hunters which is obvious when they come up with a fish, but also by evidenced by the amount of poop they produce. Very often when a cormorant surfaces or dives it squirts out an appreciable amount of whitewash into the water. I got to wondering what that did to the local water chemistry- must be pretty nutrient rich stuff. Then I wondered what the water chemistry was like around that island down on the Columbia river where 20'000 or so Cormorants are nesting. I guess, given the water volume of the Columbia, it probably amounts to much less than one person peeing in an olympic sized pool, but near the nest island I imagine great contributions of fertilizer to the local algae, algae-eating invertebrates, invertebrate-eating fish, and finally back to fish-eating Cormorants. Or something like that.

Looking a bit into poop chemistry online I came across guano. In our watery climate bird droppings don't pile up to much -it all mostly washes away- but down in the Atacama desert on the Pacific coast of Peru and Chile it's a whole different story. It's so dry that the liquids all evaporate out of the whitewash leaving the solid nutrients behind. Over a couple of thousand years this adds up to quite a pile of nitrate and phosphorus rich stuff- guano. This stuff was so valued by the Inca's as fertilizer that if the royals caught you messing with the birds at their coastal nesting sites , you could get your Inca head lopped off. I think that's charming that the Inca civilization valued the source of that wealth - largely Cormorants, and protected the birds.

Of course this valuable commodity would eventually start a human war, which it did between Peru-Chile and Spain in the 1800's. Not only was this poop valued as fertilizer by early agribiz, it's nitrates also contributed saltpeter from which one could make smokebombs and gunpowder. In history, somebody's somehow somewhere came up with the great idea: "lets make weapons out of bird shit!". Maybe it was genius, or maybe just happened bit by bit.

Here's my theory: people protecting 'their' fertilizer supplies resorted to throwing the bird poop at human kleptos trying to steal 'their' stuff. Later, around the campfire the warriors were all whining about how much their arms and shoulders were hurting. " I'm tired of throwing this crap! " they cried. After getting drunk around the fire they started insulting each other with classics like "you throw like a girl" etcetera. This resulted in them throwing leftover crap at each other, some of which fell in the campfire and created very dense smoke. A stone cold sober fellow away from the fire then got a great idea: if we set up a smokescreen of ignited poop we can sneak up much closer to the kleptos and won't have to throw poop so far, thus saving our arms and shoulders! Unfortunately, some out-of-towners way ahead on the weapons learning curve showed up on the scene with gunpowder fueled projectile blunderbusses and did their best to do in the locals. With more back and forth technology theft and trading they were able to have a nice little birdshit war a few centuries later. This never could have happened without all those pooping Cormorants, and other birds!

Back to Puget Sound. Everett, being estuary murky, is a poor place to observe diving birds beneath the surface, but a few years ago I was doing boat work at Seattle's Elliot Bay marina in summer during a period of clear water and low tides. On my breaks I would lie face-down on the dock looking at all the interesting sea life on the dock floats and below. On one low-tide day I was watching Ratfish (a wonderfully weird shark relative) ghosting along the bottom, about 20 ft. down. All of a sudden an adult Double-crested Cormorant zoomed under the dock right below me looking quite huge compared to the smaller creatures I'd been watching and moving at an amazing rate of speed. Propelled by feet alone, wings held tight, it looked remarkably un-birdlike. One could well imagine it's dinosaur heritage in that brief moment.

Jeff Gibson
Everett Wa