Guests checking into the Stansbury Holiday Motel on South Australia's Yorke Peninsula will be greeted with a sign warning them not to park under the pine trees.
On the sign is a photo of a car dappled with what appears to be white paint.
"People were getting so annoyed that they were walking out to cars covered in shit," motel manager Tracy Millard said.
Pied cormorants, also known as shags, are native black and white seabirds that spend their days fishing at sea.
At sunset, they return to shore and roost in the Norfolk Island pine trees that line the foreshore opposite the local pub.
"There are hundreds of them, if not thousands," said Ms Millard.
She said she made the sign because she was tired of waking up to late-night calls from guests because there were no car washing facilities on the Yorke Peninsula.
"[It] was getting a bit ridiculous when I was having at least eight people a night asking to wash their car," she said.
'Shag art'
Ms Millard's most memorable encounter was with a Sydney man who had a leisurely dinner at the pub followed by a stroll down the jetty.
He had stayed in Stansbury for a while and got to know the locals.
"When got back to his hired four-wheel drive, he had runs of shit from the top of his car to the bottom — and that is not a word of a lie," Ms Millard said.
"That's when we nicknamed it 'shag art' because I had to try and put a bit of humour into it."
An ill wind
Besides cars, the roofs and footpaths of businesses also get covered in shag art.
Rob Rankine owns the pub and said the carpark underneath the pine trees opposite was unusable at night.
"When there's a sea breeze the poo flies all over our pub and it's like our pub has been painted in shag poo," he said.
He said the pub's windows sometimes had to be washed as many as four times a week.
Mr Rankine estimated that there were about 400 birds filling the top eight branches of the pine trees.
No solution in sights
The Department of Environment and Water recently allowed the Yorke Peninsula Council to apply for multiple permits to reduce the high numbers of cormorants.
Previously the council was granted a single permit that allowed them to cull between 50 to 100 birds a year.
But the council's senior compliance officer Phil Herrmann said that was just a "bandaid solution".
He said officers would shoot the birds and try to scare them off over three or four days, but they always returned within a week.
Mr Rankine said locals were used to culling certain animals but tourists had a harder time with it.
Mr Rankine said the police once attended the venue after a call from distraught diners.
A different roost to rule?
Mr Hermann said he felt the number of cormorants was increasing.
"There were 1,000 at Ardrossan on the boat ramp and there are up to 1,000 on the Port Vincent marina," he said.
Birdlife Australia national public affairs manager Sean Dooley said he understood the damage cormorants caused, but culling them had to be a last resort.
"I imagine the smell could be very overpowering," he said.
Mr Dooley said cormorants tended to flock together and fed cooperatively, but the numbers in these towns seemed excessively high.
"There must be some rich feeding area nearby that these birds are taking advantage of," he said.
Mr Dooley suggested building an alternative roosting spot away from people.
Mr Herrmann said they needed a long-term solution and were open to suggestions.
"Council hasn't got the expertise but [we] need to look at the big picture about the exact numbers, where they're coming from and how they're increasing," he said.
