- [Narrator] On January 15th, 2009, US Airways flight 1549
struck a flock of geese shortly after take-off,
ingesting some of the birds into its engines.
- [Pilot] This is Cactus 1539 hit birds.
We've lost thrust on both engines.
We're turning back towards LaGuardia.
- [Man] Tower stop your departure.
Got an emergency returning.
- [Pilot] We can't do it.
We're gonna be in the Hudson.
- [Narrator] There were mostly only minor injuries,
and the only fatalities were the geese.
This was a freak incident.
But wildlife strikes in general are actually pretty common.
To keep these encounters from turning deadly,
and ideally prevent them altogether,
the U.S. government runs entire departments
dedicated to managing wildlife strikes.
Because the alternative can be a lot worse
than what happened to flight 1549.
This work is critical, and there's a lot that goes into it.
From habitat management, to sequencing animal DNA,
to collecting a gnarly substance known as snarge.
- Oh yummy, gold mine.
(playful music)
Bird one is entering the AMA.
- [Narrator] We paid a visit to JFK International Airport
in New York to talk to Laura Francoeur.
She oversees wildlife management operations
for airports across the region.
- [Narrator] The main goal of the airport
for managing wildlife is to manage three things,
food, cover, and water.
And if you can limit the amount
of food, cover, and water on an airport,
you can actually reduce the amount of wildlife
that's attracted to it in the first place.
Laura and her team work hard to make airports inhospitable
to animals to keep them off the runway.
Things like getting rid of trees that local species like,
and planting ones they don't,
insect control and waste management.
But sometimes there's only so much you can do.
JFK, for example, is right on Jamaica Bay.
It's surrounded on three sides by water,
which even with mitigation efforts
makes it a prime location for certain wildlife
to find its way onto the airfield.
Right now it's turtles.
- Oh, there's a terrapin right there.
Oh, there's another one right here.
- [Narrator] Every summer hundreds of
diamond backed terrapins descend on JFK's main runway
looking for a spot to lay their eggs.
- There's just a really rich environment.
Wetlands, salt marsh, a lot of grasslands.
So it's attractive to a variety of wildlife because of that.
- [Narrator] The airport is also above high tide line,
which makes it a great place for the terrapins
to come out of the salt marsh to nest,
sometimes in large numbers, like in 2009.
- All of the sudden we had 175 diamondback terrapins
in about a two-hour window.
We'd never seen so many terrapins all at the same time.
We didn't know where they were coming from,
and why we had so many.
- [Narrator] Since then, Laura and her team
have introduced special fencing along the runway
that keeps the turtles from trotting out in front of a 747.
But on occasion, they still find a way through.
- We don't know why,
but some will come in from the west side
and walk all the way across the taxi way,
the runway, the service road.
Every once in a while,
you get a terrapin that wanders far and wide.
(airplane engine rumbling)
- [Narrator] When Laura finds terrapins,
she scans them to see if they've been tagged already.
- [Laura] It behooves us to actually
capture those terrapins,
mark them so we can monitor the population,
and then release them again.
That way we can track them over time
and determine if our population is growing,
decreasing, or stabilized.
- [Narrator] Of course terrapins
are a very seasonal problem.
Of the 63 terrapin strikes that have occurred at JFK,
all have occurred in June or July.
Day-to-day the most pressing wildlife issue at JFK,
and all airports, is things with wings.
- Mostly what we're seeing are kind of common birds
that you might see anywhere, not just on an airport.
So things like ducks and geese,
different types of waterfowl, wading birds,
starlings, pigeons, a few Raptors here and there.
- [Narrator] Since 1990,
there's been a steady uptick in wildlife strikes nationally,
close to 250,000 have been documented.
Most of them, birds.
- Yeah if you look at the data in our database,
you can see an upward trend of strikes from year to year.
Now, I wouldn't say that's because of
more species are being struck.
I think it's a result of our outreach activities,
just awareness of how to report,
and easability to report through our website
and electronic versions.
- [Narrator] Wesley Major is an airport safety specialist
at the Federal Aviation Administration.
He manages their wildlife strike database.
Even though reports are submitted voluntarily,
the database has been pretty successful.
Every year the FAA publishes an annual report
from this information that looks at national trends.
What species airports and pilots
should be on the lookout for,
what the most common damage is,
and the cost, both financial and human.
- It's a tool for airports to look at specific strikes
and examine strike dynamics.
And airports use the database to
evaluate their wildlife management programs.
- [Narrator] Now don't cancel your flights just yet.
While there are a lot of strikes,
most don't even cause damage.
In fact, a lot of the time pilots don't even know
that they happened until after landing.
They might find a hint of evidence on the aircraft
that they hit something,
but it's still important to report that evidence
and find out what they hit,
because the next strike might not be so harmless.
- When we're collecting the remains from the aircraft,
it's usually bird and feather remains.
Could be other wildlife remains as well.
We can take those remains and send them
to the Smithsonian Institution's Feather Lab.
- [Narrator] Those remains are called-
- Snarge.
(Carla laughing)
Snarge, I think it means combination of snot and garbage.
(Carla laughing)
- [Narrator] Carla Dove is the program manager
at the Smithsonian's Feather Identification Lab.
She's been doing bird CSI for the FAA for 30 years.
The Smithsonian receives around 10,000 bird strike cases
a year from all over the world.
- It could be whole feathers or parts of birds,
all the way down to what we call snarge or bird ick,
which is the tissue and the blood
that's wiped off of the aircraft.
- [Narrator] Large feather samples
are brought to the research collection
where Carla will match them up with specimens
from the museum's study skins.
The museum has over 640,000 of them
representing 80% of known bird species.
- This is a typical case of a bird strike
that has some whole feathers.
And the note on this report says
that the pilot reported striking an osprey.
- [Narrator] To verify the pilot's report,
Carla fetches an osprey from the collection
so she can compare the feathers.
- [Carla] You can see a very good match.
- [Narrator] But if a sample has no identifiable feathers,
only snarge, it's sent to the DNA lab.
Faridah Dahlin, the Feather Lab's Molecular Technician
then processes the samples.
After a machine extracts the DNA it's PCR tested.
If there's viable DNA, it's sequenced even further.
The genetic sequence it spits out
is checked against an online database,
which shows Faridah what type of bird was struck.
But not all samples have viable DNA.
- This is stuff that's been maybe sitting
on an aircraft for a while.
It could be contaminated with heat, with fuel oil.
So those samples are still identified
using our morphological tools in our toolbox.
And that involves making a micro slide
from that snargy icky mess.
And lots of times, there are little feather barbules
in there that we can look at the microscopic characters
and narrow that down to a group of birds.
We may be able to determine if it's a duck versus a pigeon.
- [Narrator] Knowing what species are endangering aircraft
and vice versa informs the strategies
that wildlife biologists use.
It can help engineers design better engines and windshields,
or help inform more accurate bird strike models
for flight training simulators.
- It reduces the risk, saves money, and saves lives.
- [Narrator] And valuable information
gleaned from the feather lab
can sometimes be really surprising.
- One of the things that DNA has done for us
is opened up our eyes
to what kinds of things are really being hit.
We are getting things like bats, for example,
that pilots initially thought they were just hitting birds.
This year we even had a cicada strike.
- [Narrator] As more planes take to the skies,
more bird strikes are likely to happen,
and this work will continue to be more crucial than ever
to prevent damaging strikes.
One day, maybe, we'll find some way
to avoid bird strikes altogether.
But for now, Carla, Laura,
and there are many counterparts in the lab
and on the airfields
will continue to do this necessary work.
- I think one of the things that I've learned
in my 30 years of working here
is that we really don't know what these collections
are gonna be used for in the future.
I mean, there were no airplanes
when this collection was being created.
And here we are now using it to improve
human health and safety, to help save birds.
It's a timeline.
It's a geographic global scale, you know, collection
that is here for researchers all over the world.
All kinds of passerines are involved in bird strikes.
This is a little indigo buntings.
We have beautiful scarlet tanagers, song sparrows.
Just about any common bird that you can imagine
has been hit by a aircraft.
We have somewhere around 500 different species of birds
have been involved in bird strikes.