It often rains down from the sky in all the wrong places.
Now marine scientists are going to try to direct where bird droppings fall in the Florida Keys to re-grow patches of sea grass scarred by boat groundings.
Next month, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will put up 97 bird bathrooms -- vertical PVC pipes topped with wooden blocks for perches -- in shallow waters off Marathon.
The perches are designed to lure cormorants, pelicans and other seabirds to a specific drop zone: a patch of turtle grass inside the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. The grounding of a motorboat there in May 2001 and efforts to dislodge it tore out portions of the sea grass bed, sanctuary officials said.
Bird droppings contain phosphorus, a good sea grass fertilizer, and the result of all that bird perching will be small, steady doses of phosphorus plopping into the water during the 18-month restoration, said Sean Meehan, an NOAA field scientist based in Marathon.
The fertilizer will help not only the existing grass, but also plugs of shoal grass that officials intend to transplant at the site. The two combined should help fill in bald spots before storms and currents can further erode them, Meehan said. With those gaps stabilized, turtle grass can then creep in and take over, he said.
"The birds are already, how should we put this delicately, doing their thing," marine sanctuary spokeswoman Cheva Heck said. "We're just encouraging them to go to a certain area."
After years of study, biologists intend to use the perches for sea grass recovery work from Key Largo to Key West. And they'll have lots of places to work on.