Dirty Sally was a tenant who rented a very small cottage from me several years ago. We had just completed a full and very expensive renovation and I was very excited to have a new tenant. Without thinking it through, I said “sure, your birds are fine”. Two beautiful big pet cockatoos moved into my studio rental with Sally.

How much trouble can two birds be anyhow? Well, the birds were free range. In other words, they went everywhere. An interesting tip about birds is that they cannot control where they go to the bathroom. They spontaneously poop. There was a lot of bird poop, (guano is the technical term) on the floor, in her bed, on the counters. Everywhere.

How can someone live that way? Good question but she loved her birds. They would all get under the covers and watch TV.

Guano also covers whole islands due to the high traffic of sea birds. In fact, there are islands off the coast of South America that are called Guano Islands because there is so much bird poop. The guano is rich in minerals and gets very hard. Native Peruvians treasured it as a fertilizer.

By the time Sally left we had lots of work to do chipping away at all that guano. Fortunately we had a security deposit that paid my handyman Bill to scrape the guano off the beautiful terra cotta floors. When the guano was gone, we had to re stain the grout. The wonderful mineral properties of the guano prized by the Peruvians bleached the grout. Although the floors were new, the grout was now mottled and ugly. So my handyman Bill spent one full day on hands and knees staining the grout lines. When all was said and done it cost about $600 to clean the place up.

Got to love your birds….