Urban Birdhouse Inspired by Shoes Strung on Power Lines

Check out this cool green gear: urban birdhouses designed to imitate shoes thrown over power lines, providing a home for wildlife that’s been displaced by urban growth.  If we’re going to have stuff dangling from power lines, it might as well serve a good purpose, right?

Design Band calls it:

an urban birdhouse inspired by the uniquely American act
of throwing shoes over power lines (gangs use this to mark
their “turf”), Bird Turf proudly reclaims city space for natural
habitat by manipulating a distinctly cultural typology

Design Band is a collaborative effort between designers Emilie Baltz and Ben Bearsch.

Link [Design Band]

Peru Turning to Armed Guards to Protect Precious Bird Shit

You may have heard of Peak Oil, but how about Peak Guano? Guano, otherwise known as bird shit, was once so much in demand that wars were fought over it. After synthetic fertilizer was invented, the industry nearly went extinct – but as organic fertilizers come back into vogue, officials in Peru are finding themselves needing to protect it again.

From The New York Times:

The worldwide boom in commodities has come to this: Even guano, the bird dung that was the focus of an imperialist scramble on the high seas in the 19th century, is in strong demand once again.

“Before there was oil, there was guano, so of course we fought wars over it,” said Pablo Arriola, director of Proabonos, the state company that controls guano production, referring to conflicts like the Chincha Islands War, in which Peru prevented Spain from reasserting control over the guano islands. “Guano is a highly desirous enterprise.”

It is a minor miracle that any guano at all is available here today, reflecting a century-old effort hailed by biologists as a rare example of sustainable exploitation of a resource once so coveted that the United States authorized its citizens to take possession of islands or keys where guano was found.

Guano sells for $250 per ton, going up to $500 when it’s headed to countries like the U.S., France and Israel. While it’s highly prized as an organic fertilizer, it isn’t all rosy. The anchovies that the seabirds eat to produce the rich guano are being overfished, and the bird population is shrinking. Peru is working hard to protect the birds, going so far as to introduce lizards to hunt down ticks that infest the birds and posting armed guards to prevent fisherman from scaring them away. Where once 60 million seabirds flew overhead, there are now only about 4 million.

Peak Guano is coming, no doubt about it:

Uriel de la Torre, a biologist who specializes in conserving the guanay cormorant and other seabirds, said that unless some measure emerged to prevent overfishing, both the anchovetas and the seabirds here could die off by 2030.

“It would be an inglorious conclusion to something that has survived wars and man’s other follies,” Mr. de la Torre said. “But that is the scenario we are facing: the end of guano.”

Link [The New York Times] via [Treehugger]
Photo credit: Tomas Munita for The New York Times

Artist Benjamin Verdonck Literally Nesting in a Rotterdam Tower

File this under awesomely weird: artist Benjamin Verdonck has created a man-sized nest and perched it high above the city of Rotterdam, clinging to the side of the Rotterdam Weena Tower. He calls this art project ‘The Great Swallow’ and to give you an idea of just how weird it gets, there is indeed an egg in there. What’s in it or what the artist aims to do with it isn’t clear. The picture alone makes this afraid-of-heights girl want to cling to something solid for dear life.

Neatorama has it:

A nest is hanging high from the Rotterdam Weena Tower. Feathers fly around it. There’s a man in the nest. He nested there only four days ago. He stretches his arms out wide open, as if he wants to fly. But it also seems like he is trying to stay upright (losing his feathers). Some people even think that the man wants to embrace them.

If you’re wondering what the hell that nest is made out of, it’s apparently the crowns of twenty-three silver birches, one birch, one willow, two straw bales, one bucket of spit (um, what?), three bags of sand, twelve buckets of glue and nineteen cans of polyurethane foam. So, they collected enough spit to fill a bucket? Whoa.

Well, props to Benjamin Verdonck for getting a lot of people to think, “huh?”

You can see the YouTube video clip here.

Link [Neatorama] + [The Great Swallow]

Five Star April Fools From the BBC: Flying Penguins

First up- flying penguins from Terry Jones and the BBC.

Now THAT is an April Fools joke.

Tripp Isenhour, Pro Golfer and Dick, Kills a Hawk with a Well Aimed Ball

Pro Golfer Tripp Isenhour is a dick.

Tripp “I’m a Dick” Isenhour killed a hawk with a well aimed golf shot because it was making noise as he taped a TV show. The accurate-but-still-a-dick golfer, whose real name John Henry Isenhour III is even more dickish than “Trip”, has been charged with cruelty to animals for for killing a migratory bird. He faces up to 14 months in jail and $1,500 in fines. Toss him in the clink for a year and let him get pounded on by all the jailed bird lovers.

Link [Huffington Post]