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Article: Guano happens (sometimes): the discovery during the mid-19th century that bird droppings could be used to reverse falling crop yields saw governments around the world join a frenzied rush to annex any guano-encrusted outcrop they could get their hands on. Jordan Goodman delves into the history of the excreta change the world.(GUANO)
- Article from:
- Geographical
- Article date:
- November 1, 2006
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2006 Circle Publishing Ltd. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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It may not be a suitable topic for polite dinner conversation, but it's a fact that the guanay cormorant has no equal when it comes to the value and purity of its droppings. Not that you're very likely to see this bird or its waste products now. But for more than half a century, its excretions were on everyone's lips, sometimes literally so.
In Quechua, the language of the Inca Empire, the word for this miracle excretion was huanu, but the word came to the West slightly garbled as guano, and so it has remained.
For centuries, coastal Peruvian farmers had been fertilising their crops with a fine yellowish powder scraped from a few offshore islands. The ...