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Comment by wayne | Hacker News Reader

I learned from the book "How to Hide an Empire" that an initial motivation for US imperialism in the Caribbean was to harvest bird droppings for fertilizer, even to the point of conflicts with Britain and Venezuela: https://www.vox.com/2014/7/31/5951731/bird-shit-imperialism

There was a 1856 law that encouraged US citizens to claim land for the country if there was bird poo on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guano_Islands_Act

This law is how the US originally got possession of Midway, which became very well-known during WWII (I always wondered how the US got it originally): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midway_Atoll

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Peru and Chile fought a war over seabird guano:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Pacific

I always though the guano was desired for saltpeter, which is used to make gunpowder. It doesn't seem economical to transport as fertilizer.

I thought so too, but Wiki says fertilizer was in fact the main usage. I suppose you get many extra units of grain per unit of added guano.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guano

"As a manure, guano is a highly effective fertilizer . . . Guano was also, to a lesser extent, sought for the production of gunpowder and other explosive materials. The 19th-century guano trade played a pivotal role in the development of modern input-intensive farming."

Chicago should build new designs of these around Millennium Park, and maybe reduce their strife with what is both native wildlife and a productive resource. They really can't stand pigeons.

Hopefully the snake population is low.

You need only nitrogen for explosives, but nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium for fertilizer. Therefore guano (which contains all three) is overkill for explosives but great as a fertilizer, while synthetic nitrogen compounds are insufficient as a "complete" fertilizer and have to be supplemented with the two other elements from other sources.

Well argued!

In a world without synthetic fertilisers, and where farming is economically important you'd be willing to go to quite some lengths to get fertiliser.

In Ian Flemming's first James Bond novel, the 1958 Dr. No, the eponymous villain is "a Chinese operator of a guano mine" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._No_(novel)).

Odd that at the same time the Passenger Pidgeon[1] was hunted to extinction.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_pigeon

It's not odd at all. Power, such as technology, can be used to accomplish various things.

Guano deposits..is that the same root as iguana?

I doubt it. "guano" comes from an Andean language [0], while "iguana" comes from thousands of miles away, from the Caribbean [1]. Both are pre-Columbian words that entered English via Spanish.

(I'm not an expert; I just looked up the "etymology" links on Wiktionary).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quechuan_languages#Vocabulary

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taíno_language#Vocabulary

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