The enigma of the swing seats and the passing birds – is the truth out there?

When my boy was very little I bought and assembled his first swing, which had a bright blue seat. He loved his new piece of leisure equipment and played proudly on it countless hundreds of times over the years, happily swinging back and forth. The swing survived many seasons of intemperate weather conditions and even being bumped by the van of a gardener who had been employed to trim the trees in our yard.

However, it was not long after the swing had been first erected that I became aware of an unfortunate trend. Simply put, it was impossible not to notice the frequency with which birds were pooping on the plastic blue seat.

My son liked to play on the swing most days when the weather permitted and, on the vast majority of occasions, would have to request that I clear the seat of bird poop before he began. On more days than not over the last decade I found myself wearily trudging out to the swing with a bottle of bleach spray in one hand and a roll of kitchen paper in the other.

While I say I noticed this trend, that does not mean that I gave it a great amount of thought. I think at first, I merely assumed it to be bad luck or coincidence. Later, as it continued, I thought that perhaps the frequency seemed to be exaggerated because the white bird poo showed up more clearly on the bright plastic seat. But the extension of this implausible argument seemed to be that there is bird poop falling all around us on a constant basis which we just don’t become aware until it hits an object we are paying attention to.

It was difficult, in the end, to come up with any conclusion other than that birds seemed to like, whether consciously or not, to poop on the seat of my son’s swing. This created a whole new range of questions. Can birds spot and favour bright colours? Are they able to target particular objects? Could their aim really be so true as to regularly strike a small plastic object from a height? As I said, I didn’t give it a great amount of thought.

Earlier this year it became apparent that the swing had outlived its useful time. My son still liked to play on it most days, but he is bigger now and swings much higher than he used to. As I saw the ancient frame creaking and wobbling, I became concerned about his safety and knew it was time for an upgrade.

So, several months ago, I bought a new, larger swing. I assembled it myself and then employed my da’s help to dig holes deep in the ground and fill them with concrete to keep the new structure secure and safe. The new swing had a bright orange seat and it is fair to say my son was delighted with it. It is located in exactly the same position, right in front of the tall trees.

His habit of playing on the swing continued through the summer. On each occasion when he went outside, I found myself through habit reaching for the cleaning spray and kitchen roll. But, as it turned out, my help was never requested. I went outside on a couple of occasions and checked the orange seat - it was clean and free of mess.

It is at this point that I started to become more intrigued. As I said at the beginning, I wanted to write about it, but I needed to be sure. Perhaps the birds were simply getting used to the new seat? Maybe the migratory patterns meant there were no birds passing over our back garden for those particular few days?

So, I waited. Two months later and there had still not been a single incident of a bird pooping on the orange swing. On a comparable basis, I would likely have had to clean the blue swing seat 20 or more times during a similar timescale. While I could provide no scientific explanation for this trend, it now seemed at least to be clear that a trend had been identified.

So, I decided to explore further through Google. Surprisingly, there was a rather thin canon of work of the subject of bird’s preferences when pooping on different coloured swing seats. However, I did discover that there had been a study conducted some years ago into which colours of cars are most recently used as a toilet by birds (this gave me some level of validation for my direction of thought and reassured that I had not, as some family members suggested, ‘gone mad again’).

This research (which I should point out was carried out by a company which also sells car spray paint), recorded the number of times birds defecated on cars in Brighton, Glasgow, Leeds, Manchester and Bristol. It found red cars were targeted the most, and green cars the least. One article I read suggested red cars are favoured because they remind birds of ripened fruit.

Further reading revealed that the British Trust for Ornithology was sceptical about the car colour theory. It said that while birds can be attracted to certain colours, the frequency of droppings is more likely linked to where you park – ie, under a tree or a power line where birds roost.

So, as I write this, I find my gaze casting out the window to the swing in our back yard right underneath the tall trees. I can easily understand why the blue swing was frequently adorned with droppings, but I am still at a loss as to why the orange seat remains poop free. Perhaps the truth is out there?