Really?
Did you ever wonder why bird poop is mainly white with a black spot in the middle?…Neither did I. But before I go on to something even more educational and entertaining, as if anything could be, I suppose there possibly might be a few readers who have pondered that mystery to no end.
I had a reason to ponder a similar mystery way back in a past life when I was a newspaper delivery boy on my early morning route. It had just stopped raining, the sun was rising and peeking through the remaining clouds, birds were singing. My canvas sack of rubber-banded papers was stuffed to the max and stretched across the handlebars of my bike when I pedaled down the street to the first house on my route. I passed under a maple tree with raindrops on its leaves sparkling in the sun and I looked up for a moment to admire nature’s twinkling beauty. When I lowered my head to watch where I was going, a tweeting bird above let loose with one of the aforementioned white-with-black-spot bombs, which landed behind my glasses, right in my eye. Immediately, I grabbed at my glasses and pulled them off to try to wipe my eye with the back of my hand. Because I now only had one hand on my overloaded bike handle, I was thrown off balance. My bike skidded on the wet pavement and fell over, scattering me and my heavy sack of papers over the street.
I lay in the wet street under my bike with my burning eye and scattered papers. I was thankful the bird wasn’t a condor. Then I wondered why bird poop is white with a black spot in the middle. Surely, I jest. What I really wondered as I tried to get myself upright, was what forces in the universe conspired to unite at just the right moment to cause a bird to relieve itself at the exact instant I was passing under the tree, with my head angled in the perfect position for a glop of stinging bird droppings to pass through the 3/8” of space between my glasses and my eyebrow to land precisely in my eye?
Before I was so rudely interrupted and sidetracked by me, repeating a paperboy story you regular readers of this column will recall I’d shared some time back, but which seemed appropriate to today’s subject, I was going to give you the poop on bird poop, just information, not the actual product. Birds defecate and urinate at the same time out of the same orifice. The white is the urine and the black is the other stuff. Doing this in one operation from the same place seems to be very efficient. It explains why my eye burned, for those of you who’ve never experienced bird droppings in your eye, since the slightly sticky urine clings to the feces. The bird I interacted with probably thought voiding its load on a moving object was a good way to get it to a different area, somewhere out of the neighborhood.
As promised, it’s now on to something even more educational, but not nearly as entertaining. Did you ever wonder where the remaining free-roaming (black) panthers are in the United States? I often wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat wondering on this topic. Al Demeter Park in Aurora would be a good guess, but a wrong one. Although many creatures resembling black panthers roam Al’s park freely, the only real so-called black panthers are in the Florida Everglades.
And finally, have you ever wondered what the largest rodent living in America is? It’s the beaver.
See what fascinating facts you can learn by reading my column? It’s just like watching PBS without the annoying pledge breaks. You student readers even may pick up a credit or two. I wouldn’t count on it, though.