Suddenly, it happened, with an impact that rocked my small pickup and almost completely covered the left half of my windshield: a white viscous liquid hit my truck. At first I thought someone had thrown a bucket of white paint, but I had seen no one on or adjacent to the road prior to the impact. Since I was now driving blind, at fifty miles per hour, I reached hastily for the wiper control. Bad move! The water supply for my wipers was empty.
By this time I had noticed black lumps in the white substance and identified it as bird shit. The dry wipers had now spread the shit all over my left windshield with the exception of about one inch of the bottom. I alternated between scrunching down in the seat so as to peer under the shit and steering with my left hand only as I shifted my body to the right so I could see around it. In this manner, I was able to reach work safely and hose off my truck.
Now my question is: what kind of bird could have done this? What avian cloacae could pump out feces in such sufficient quantity that Tom Sawyer could have white-washed a major portion of Aunt Polly's fence with it? A flying reptile in the Jurassic era would have been proud of this poop.
I was no stranger to bird shit. A few years before, I had been riding in the back of a truck, helping a friend who has a small cattle operation get some hay in from the field before an impending storm, when suddenly something warm and moist hit my right forearm. My first thought was that the tobacco-chewing bastard riding shotgun in the truck had hit me with tobacco juice. "No," I thought, as I looked at the offending spot, "tobacco juice is brown... this is white." I glanced back at the tree under which we had just passed and there was the culprit: a very cocky-looking and obviously pleased starling sitting on a limb that had been directly over me as we traveled under the tree.
No starling, however, was the answer to my question on this day. What bird possessed an asshole (I realize that technically birds have cloacae) large enough to drop a bomb of this magnitude? That night, I asked my son-in-law for his opinion. He was a wildlife officer with the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency. He pointed out that I was less than a mile from the Cumberland River when the strike occurred, which meant it was probably a heron, as they are famous for the copious amount of feces they can drop. God help anyone who ever takes a direct hit on their body.
Years ago, when I was at Keflavik International Airport in Iceland, I worked in the control tower with an Icelandic crew. When things were slow we would go search the rocky ground around the runways for seagull eggs, which are quite tasty. We knew when we were getting close to a find because a squadron of gulls would pass overhead in carpet-bombing formation and shit more or less simultaneously. If it had been a squadron of herons, we would have been goners for sure.