This is one of a series of three articles on Ireland in 2025 including Kelly Earley and Patrick Freyne.
There’s a street in Limerick city called Bedford Row. If you stand there in silence, watching, you’ll see a man pull the collar of his T-shirt up over his mouth when he walks. Then you’ll notice another person doing it, and another, until you realise that everybody on this street is covering their mouths and noses.
Bedford Row stretches up from Thomas Street and down as far as the river Shannon. Long ago, when Limerick had a thriving bacon industry, there were three abattoirs at the top; the blood of a hundred pigs would slosh red down the cobbles and trickle into the river. My ma remembers the smell. But now it’s paved and pedestrianised, trees line either side, and it’s our main thoroughfare for restaurants and cafes. There’s eating and drinking in Bedford Row, and on one of them peachy-coloured evenings with the long slanty sun, it’s my favourite place in the universe.
So why do people pull their T shirts up over their mouths when they walk through? Well, in the summer, the whole place stinks with the novel honk of bird shit. So much so, that in Limerick we call the street The Bird Shit District. The paving would be slippy with the grey sludge of it. The stench hangs in the ether and follows you around like a Jack Russell looking for rubs. An eggy bang that’s very difficult to pin down, a bit like that farty handshake when you open a packet of ham. There’s no smell like Bedford Row on a summer evening.
In fairness to Limerick council, they wash it down daily. But it definitely puts people off eating outside and taking in the loveliness of our pedestrianised dining street.
The culprits are starlings, which I have great compassion for. They’re navigating an urban environment while trying to survive as best they can. The leafy trees along Bedford Row are the closest thing to a forest that they can find in their territory. At about 8pm, they perform what’s known as a murmuration – those swirling, synchronised flocks that look like a shoal of fish in the air.
They darken the sky over the Shannon. With no traffic, you’ll hear the whoosh of their wings above. Starlings are small little birds. Their predators are hawks and falcons, who come out at dusk to eat them. So the starlings dance together in an intimidating unified mob. I’ve watched the starlings of Limerick take the shape of a single gigantic bird to scare the hawks away. Once they feel safe, the starlings relax and settle into the trees along Bedford Row. You won’t see them, but you can hear them. The trees vibrate with birdsong and the violence of a thousand splats on paving. The smell could grow shoulders and headbutt you.
If these trees were in a meadow, the starlings’ droppings would be regenerating the ecosystem – spreading wildflowers, fertilising the soil and improving biodiversity. But here? It’s wasted and washed away by the council’s brushes. They’re shitting on paving slabs. Paradoxically, they’re doing this above a street designed for outdoor dining. Humans also want to gather, eat, and talk about food, but we can’t because we’ll get shat on by a starling. And none of this is the starlings’ fault – it’s our fault for building a city where a forest once grew.
Now, why am I so obsessed with bird shit? I’m not, I’m a writer and my job is to search for stories in my environment. The story of bird shit is a story about nitrogen. Bird shit is the reason the world has a population of eight billion people. Bird shit is a story about climate collapse.
Bird shit is incredibly rich in nitrogen, a biologically limited resource. Nitrogen is all around us: the atmosphere is 78 per cent nitrogen, and when the sun’s light reaches Earth, it collides with nitrogen gas – and this is why the sky is
But our ancestors couldn’t extract nitrogen from the air.
Humans discovered agriculture 12,000 years ago, marking the shift from hunter-gatherers to settled farming societies. Growing crops removed nitrogen from the soil, depleting it over time. Farmers needed to find ways to replenish nitrogen, initially through manure, then through crop rotation with legumes, which can naturally take atmospheric nitrogen and distribute it into soil. But it was never enough. By the 1500s, with the world’s population reaching 580 million, agriculture was struggling to keep up. That’s when the colonial powers – Spain, Britain, France – discovered the power of bird shit.
In South America, certain seabirds, like the Peruvian pelican, shat so much that they created entire islands of hardened bird shit – guano. The indigenous people of Peru had been using it as fertiliser for centuries. When the Spanish colonisers saw this, they treated it like gold and stole it. Europe’s population was expanding, but farmers couldn’t produce enough food. Guano became a highly sought-after commodity, leading to a European scramble to colonise islands in the Pacific that were made of bird shit.
By the late 1800s, the world was running out of bird shit. European nations had mined every guano island they could find. A global panic for nitrogen created a scramble for bones, another rich nitrogen source. The British and French began digging up old battlefields, like Waterloo, skeletons of soldiers and horses, burning them down for fertiliser to feed the world.
At the turn of the 19th century, the world faced a very serious crisis. With 1.6 billion people to feed and depleting access to usable nitrogen fertiliser, a global famine loomed. But then, in 1909, German chemist Fritz Haber developed the Haber Process, a method of extracting nitrogen from the air and turning it into fertiliser. This scientific discovery changed the course of history. Almost like alchemy, it created an endless supply of nitrogen from the air, to be fully exploited by the forces of capitalism.
We took the blue from the sky and mass-produced the bombs that enabled mechanised warfare in the 20th century. The same process that allowed us to grow food also created powerful explosives. The Haber Process has become a driving force behind climate collapse. By pulling nitrogen from the air to create synthetic fertilisers, it supercharged industrial agriculture, allowing global food production to expand far beyond natural limits.
As a result, the world’s population exploded from 1.6 billion in 1900 to more than 8 billion today, putting immense strain on land, water, and energy resources. Farming became dependent on artificial nitrogen, leading to soil degradation, deforestation, and habitat destruction. Run-off from fertilisers has polluted rivers and oceans, creating massive dead zones where marine life cannot survive.
By 2020, 91 per cent of Ireland’s land was farmland, driving biodiversity loss. Peatlands, home to 25 per cent of native species, shrank by 47 per cent. Approximately 85 per cent of EU-protected habitats in Ireland are in bad or inadequate condition, with most negatively impacted by agricultural practices such as fertiliser use and drainage. Additionally, between one-fifth and one-quarter of assessed species groups in Ireland are threatened with extinction.
The intensification of agriculture has led to a biodiversity decline in Ireland, resulting in the government declaring a climate and biodiversity crisis in 2019.
The world now faces record heatwaves, crop failures and ecosystem collapse – a much greater threat than the famines we faced before 1909. What are we doing? Are we just waiting for another Fritz Haber to save the planet with a scientific breakthrough?
Last week I stood on Bedford Row, staring up at the thousands of starlings sweeping above me in their murmuration. I thought to myself, ‘We should never have taken the blue from the sky and put it in the ground.’ I felt a cold splatter on my right cheek – a starling shat on my face. It dripped down towards my lip and I tasted it with the tip of my tongue. It was disgusting. I deserved it.
Blindboy Boatclub is an author and host of The Blindboy Podcast.
