Vulture Poop Has Compromised a Customs and Border Protection Radio Tower in Texas | Smart News | Smithsonian Magazine
This makes it difficult for workers to climb and maintain the tower, as they're at risk for various diseases caused by vulture droppings.
It seems the most likely option they'll try is to put up netting around the structure to discourage the birds from landing and nesting there.
United States Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has lost control of a radio tower in Texas—not to a downed power line or a bizarre frequency fritz, but to a flock of well-fed vultures that arrived to unceremoniously drop a deuce.
The 320-foot tower, located in the city of Kingsville, is now entirely coated in the feces, urine and vomit of some 300 vultures who first began calling the facility home over six years ago, according to a CBP document. Bathed in this nauseating soup, railings, catwalks, supports and other structures around and inside the tower—many of which workers come into direct contact with—have become “a safety hazard,” Leah Asmelash and Hollie Silverman report for CNN.
Concerned that the infestation will compromise their ability to exchange intel on trade and border security, government officials are seeking to obtain a “Vulture Deterrence Netting System” that would make the tower less appealing to land on, before the birds’ roosting season begins in late summer or fall.
This makes it difficult for workers to climb and maintain the tower, as they're at risk for various diseases caused by vulture droppings.
The fear of gazing skyward into a haze of fast-pooping scavengers—which will apparently also drop their prey from heights of 300 feet or more—is reason enough to call in sick to work, but the vultures pose more than a psychological hazard. Coming into contact with their feces can also put people at risk of infectious diseases, including histoplasmosis and Salmonella, reports Justin Rohrlich for Quartz. Their sharp nails and beaks leave deep scratches in humans and machines alike, and the “reeking and corrosive vomit” they regurgitate to kill bacteria on their bodies can slowly eat away at metal. Creaking under the weight of the birds and their odious bodily fluids, the radio tower is becoming increasingly dangerous for workers to climb and maintain.
It seems the most likely option they'll try is to put up netting around the structure to discourage the birds from landing and nesting there.