The Productive Guanay

The bird islands off the coast of Peru are more than a fabulous sight to tourists. The birds are among Peru's chief assets: last year they produced fertilizer (guano) worth more than $30 million. Their value is on the increase because the Peruvian government's Guano Administration Co. has recently encouraged the birds to colonize the mainland. According to Ornithologist Robert Cushman Murphy of New York's American Museum of Natural History, the company's management of the birds is one of the world's greatest examples of practical conservation.

About eight years ago, the company decided that lack of food is not the factor that limits guano bird population. The cold Pacific off Peru is incredibly rich in life; besides such large items as tuna and whale, it contains about 25 million tons of anchovetas, the six-inch fish that is the favorite food of the birds. The company decided that the chief reason why the birds did not increase to the limit of their abundant food supply was that their small islands were overcrowded and not in the right places for harvesting fish efficiently. The birds cannot normally nest on the mainland because land animals kill them and destroy their eggs.

Artificial Islands. The company tried an experiment of setting guards to protect small peninsulas where a few birds alight occasionally. The guards shot predators such as foxes and condors, drove away egg-stealing humans. The birds responded at once by accepting the protected peninsulas as artificial islands. They came by thousands, then by millions, and settled down to fishing and producing guano.

Ten peninsulas have now been cut off with eight-foot walls. A typical one, Punto Salinas, 73 miles north of Lima, has 70 acres of birds. Mostly black-and-white guanays (cormorants), they stand wing to wing like a rippling blanket. Though the colony was established only this year, it already numbers some 2,500,000 birds. Other shore colonies are growing as fast, and some of them allow the birds to exploit parts of the fish-rich sea they could not reach before.

Cash Value. The company looks on its birds as cheap and willing workers for the national good. Each guanay, it figures, eats 240 lbs. of anchovetas a year, processing its catch into 33 lbs. of guano. Twenty-two of the 33 lbs. is harvestable; the rest is lost, mostly at sea. The cash value of each bird's annual production is $1.04, and the company is the guardian of 30 million birds.

The company is not yet satisfied. It is establishing still more land colonies so that the birds can fish closer to home. It is thinking of killing off pelicans, which are big eaters but poor producers. Sometime in the future it hopes to be guarding 100 million bird workers.

In spite of its present success, the company never forgets the catastrophe that hit the birds in 1942. A warm current called El Nino* crept down the coast of Peru. It drove the anchovetas away and starved millions of guano birds. Next time, the company intends to have a chain of walled-off peninsulas all the way to Chile. Then the birds can fly south by easy hops, and escape death-dealing El Nino.

*Named for the Christ child because it arrives about Christmas Day.

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