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There is a 120-year-old bronze statue in a park in Kanazawa, in the west of Japan, that birds never perch on and plaster with droppings. When word reached Yukio Hirose of the Physical Sciences Department at Kanazawa University, he began investigating what special property of the statue kept the feathered fiends away. After experiments with numerous birds and the materials used in making the statue, Hirose decided that gallium in the bronze was repelling the birds. But he has no idea why. Hirose is now developing a gallium-rich spray that could be used to deter birds from statues and public buildings.