There’s a crazy faux-archeological dig going on in New York Harbor right now. Belgian artist Geert Hautekiet is curating a dig on Governors Island which includes artifacts from the former Belgian/French settlers’ collection of commercially unsuccessful snow globes, like one depicting a small boy being chased by two polar bears. Read a full report in the New York Times or go to Hautekiet’s site, The Archaeological Dig to read more. For pictures of the site, check out this photo slideshow.

The site also includes a number of sculpturelike apparatuses for scaring off birds, the result — according to what Mr. Hautekiet said the archaeologists have pieced together — of a troubling period in the town’s history in 1953 called the Plague of Birds. A monthslong infestation was apparently caused when the Spanish gas station owner, distraught that his wife had left him for a trucker, built hundreds of intricate and alluring bird houses and placed them around his business, where they can now be seen.

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