An article published in Science (Fields, Helen. "Clues to Species Decline Buried in Pile of Bird Excrement." Science. 17 April 2012) suggests that the secret to helping threatened bird species may in fact live in their poop. Poop? You may ask, yes, or so say's Queen's University research technician Chris Grooms.

Grooms volunteers for an environmental group in Ontario, Canada, that's trying to conserve local wildlife. He also works in a lab at Queen's University in Kingston that studies sediments in lakes. As dirt and dead things sink to the bottom of these bodies of water, they preserve a record of environmental conditions. Grooms wondered if the same thing had happened with his pile of bird poop. He brought the idea to the head of the lab, ecologist John Smol. Smol was intrigued: "It could be 2 meters of bird poop, or it could be a pretty important story."

A team from University of Ottawa used  radioisotopes produced by nuclear bomb tests on the built up bird excrement. They measured the effect of DDT on insects the birds had eaten. The levels were high and offer a challenge to the common theory that the population of Chimney Swifts suffered as the result of increasingly capped chimneys- it could in fact be the birds' diet that resulted in their dramatic population drop. This study puts DDT back in the spotlight and suggests that the pesticide is still impacting wildlife.

As for the study innovating the way we look at poop? We can only raise our shovel in appreciated of Grooms' novel idea.

To read the article in full, visit http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2012/04/clues-to-species-decline-buried.html?ref=hp#.T5CPK64qP5k.twitter.