It’s something of a rite of passage for anyone who lives by the seaside to get pooped on by a bird, and now a new study has discovered that aerial pooping really does seem to be a preference among seabirds. Using cameras strapped to the bodies of streaked shearwaters , it recorded how the birds will take off just for the purpose of pooping, dropping their load every four to 10 minutes. That’s a lot of poop. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.

The discovery was something of a happy accident, made while trying to study how seabirds are able to use the ocean surface like a runway for taking off. While reviewing the subsequent video footage, study lead author Leo Uesaka from the University of Tokyo saw that they showed someth

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