If you don't mind a non-word digression, I can tell you some things about guano. In the late 60's, I acted as a ship's husband (vessel and charterer's agent) for ships importing guano from Chile. It was sold by a huge company called Chilean Nitrate Corp. Back then there were literally mountains of guano deposited by birds on the shore and islands in Chile. It was dug up with bulldozers and cranes with huge clamshell buckets and loaded in bulk in ships and brought here, when the process was reversed. It was a dry whitish-grey powder with very little odor. We also took care of ships importing fish meal, also from Chile. Fish meal was made from the small fish which the birds ate to produce guano, and was a brown coarse powder also with very little odor when dry, imported in 100-lb. bags. But if fish meal was allowed to get wet, not only did it smell to high heaven, it would also catch fire by spontaneous combustion, like a manure pile. No one wanted to get within 2 blocks of our dock when fishmeal was being worked in rainy weather. One of my coworkers took a bag home to put on his roses and by the next day had at least 50 cats digging up his garden. Both of these industries were done in by El Niņo, which caused a shift in the ocean currents so that the vast schools of anchovies, which were used for fish meal and eaten by the birds, moved away from the coast of Chile and have never returned.
