And you thought what the bird did to your windshield was wrong...
Thomas Keister
July 15, 2006
It was truly a shining moment. On a scale of one-to-ten in the realm of trivial knowledge, this was an easy perfect ten, no doubt about it. And where else would I acquire such a factoid, but from the good people at the Smithsonian, of course. Rather than keep the suspense up, we're talking about snarge.
Yeah. I hear you. What in the bluest of hells is snarge? Glad you asked, otherwise I'm not sure why I kept typing. Snarge is the term lab scientists at the Smithsonian have applied to the grease stain resulting from a bird-airplane collision. The Feather Identification Lab at the Smithsonian receives a dozen or so packages of snarge a day, which they sequence to identify the DNA and determine what species of bird was turned into deli salad at 2000 feet. What they do to notify the bird's next of kin remains a mystery. I kind of prefer it that way.
Not that this is a new problem. The first bird-airplane tie-up was recorded by Wilbur Wright (go figure) in 1905. Today, snarge production rings up $600 million in damage annually to aircraft, While only nine civilian deaths have been recorded since 1990, a military plane was taken down by a flock of Canada geese in 1995, killing all twenty-four people aboard. This, naturally, brings on the research and development, as losing multi million dollar aircraft is more than a slight inconvenience.
At JFK in New York, falconers are employed to take it to the pigeon population. While that is a very cool concept, I can't help but wonder how many people are getting renaissance fair kinds of jolly off being paid for that work. In New Zealand, electrified mats were used to drive off worms that were bringing in seagulls. A fair deal of time is put into engineering better planes and engines to decrease the damage and engine failures caused by bird strikes. To test whether an engine can snack on an eight pounder and stay in the air, a lab fires chickens from a cannon point-blank at an engine. My biggest question on this is why the hell did my guidance counselor not tell me about jobs like this? Having read about the chicken testing, I was also amazed to discover that as of yet, Pamela Anderson has not whipped her clothes off in protest. As if she needed a reason to get naked.
Getting back on subject, this is where the Smithsonian Institution steps in. By analyzing the snarge for DNA and identifying species, scientists can track flight patterns and activity, which pilots can obtain from a database while writing flight plans. For the record, the most most infamous birds in terms of damage are, in order, the turkey vulture, the Canada goose, and the white pelican. The most common victims, or “red shirt” birds, are horned larks and mourning doves, but even odder than everything in this story sounds, the lab has come across snarge in the past that wasn't even bird.
You heard right. In the past, airplanes have managed mid-air collisions with frogs, turtles, snakes, cats, and even a rabbit. The somewhat ironically-named Carla Dove, a snarge expert at the Smithsonian, attributes the mishaps to birds of prey dropping lunch into flight path. That's a great example of nature's cruel design right there. Some pilot, flying along, minding his own sky when all of a sudden, thunk! Meanwhile, some hawk's ticked cause he lost his lunch without benefit of having eaten it first, and six months down the road, some desk jockey at the FAA gets notice that a kitten was involved in an airplane strike. I'll bet their horoscope didn't warn them of that one.
Yeah. I hear you. What in the bluest of hells is snarge? Glad you asked, otherwise I'm not sure why I kept typing. Snarge is the term lab scientists at the Smithsonian have applied to the grease stain resulting from a bird-airplane collision. The Feather Identification Lab at the Smithsonian receives a dozen or so packages of snarge a day, which they sequence to identify the DNA and determine what species of bird was turned into deli salad at 2000 feet. What they do to notify the bird's next of kin remains a mystery. I kind of prefer it that way.
Not that this is a new problem. The first bird-airplane tie-up was recorded by Wilbur Wright (go figure) in 1905. Today, snarge production rings up $600 million in damage annually to aircraft, While only nine civilian deaths have been recorded since 1990, a military plane was taken down by a flock of Canada geese in 1995, killing all twenty-four people aboard. This, naturally, brings on the research and development, as losing multi million dollar aircraft is more than a slight inconvenience.
At JFK in New York, falconers are employed to take it to the pigeon population. While that is a very cool concept, I can't help but wonder how many people are getting renaissance fair kinds of jolly off being paid for that work. In New Zealand, electrified mats were used to drive off worms that were bringing in seagulls. A fair deal of time is put into engineering better planes and engines to decrease the damage and engine failures caused by bird strikes. To test whether an engine can snack on an eight pounder and stay in the air, a lab fires chickens from a cannon point-blank at an engine. My biggest question on this is why the hell did my guidance counselor not tell me about jobs like this? Having read about the chicken testing, I was also amazed to discover that as of yet, Pamela Anderson has not whipped her clothes off in protest. As if she needed a reason to get naked.
Getting back on subject, this is where the Smithsonian Institution steps in. By analyzing the snarge for DNA and identifying species, scientists can track flight patterns and activity, which pilots can obtain from a database while writing flight plans. For the record, the most most infamous birds in terms of damage are, in order, the turkey vulture, the Canada goose, and the white pelican. The most common victims, or “red shirt” birds, are horned larks and mourning doves, but even odder than everything in this story sounds, the lab has come across snarge in the past that wasn't even bird.
You heard right. In the past, airplanes have managed mid-air collisions with frogs, turtles, snakes, cats, and even a rabbit. The somewhat ironically-named Carla Dove, a snarge expert at the Smithsonian, attributes the mishaps to birds of prey dropping lunch into flight path. That's a great example of nature's cruel design right there. Some pilot, flying along, minding his own sky when all of a sudden, thunk! Meanwhile, some hawk's ticked cause he lost his lunch without benefit of having eaten it first, and six months down the road, some desk jockey at the FAA gets notice that a kitten was involved in an airplane strike. I'll bet their horoscope didn't warn them of that one.
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