Smithsonian study of Iraqi birds to help reduce aircraft mishaps

Published May 7, 2008
By 1st Lt. Lisa Spilinek
332nd Air Expeditionary Wing Public Affairs

BALAD AIR BASE, Iraq -- One of the Air Force's greatest air power adversaries doesn't wear the uniform of another country; it wears feathers.

Both deadly and expensive, aircraft accidents and mishaps caused by collisions with birds have cost the service approximately $35 million each year since 1985, according to Air Force safety records.

"Bird strikes have a very negative impact on the mission," said Capt. Andrew Baumgart, 23rd Expeditionary Fighter Squadron F-16 Fighting Falcon pilot. "In the best case scenario, they will cause additional maintenance man hours for minor repairs, inspections and cleanup. In the worst case scenario, they can cause the loss of a multimillion dollar warfighting asset. Either way it has a very negative impact on our ability to generate more sorties and continued air coverage for our guys on the ground."

To better understand their winged rivals, Air Force safety personnel have for years shipped feather, blood and tissue samples from bird strikes and bird depredation efforts to the Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of Natural History, Feather Identification Laboratory in Washington, D.C., to be analyzed. Sometimes the remains of whole birds were also shipped to the laboratory to be studied from locations in the U.S., but never from Iraq -- until now.

Members of the 332nd Air Expeditionary Wing Safety office here sent their first shipment of whole bird carcasses, obtained through bird depredation efforts, to the Feather Lab May 3, said Tech. Sgt. David Young, 332 AEW noncommissioned officer in charge of flight safety, who is deployed from Elmendorf Air Force Base, Alaska.

The sergeant heads up Balad's Bird Aircraft Strike Hazard program through which trained volunteers shoot birds that pose threats to aircraft. The Feather Lab experts will examine the more than 40 birds shipped from Balad to determine what species live in the vicinity of the Air Force's most forward deployed wing.

The shipment represents a win-win situation for the busy air base, where multiple types of aircraft take off and land 24/7, and the Smithsonian.

"Sending [the birds] to the Smithsonian will help establish what the species are here and their migratory routes. We don't have that kind of data here," said Sergeant Young who added that 124 bird strikes had been recorded on Balad aircraft from October 2006 to October 2007.

The data on the shipped birds will be compiled and evaluated by the Smithsonian laboratory experts and provided to the Balad Safety personnel. Understanding the types of birds that live near Balad's extremely busy runways will help the Safety personnel take actions to reduce their nesting habitats in order to bring down the bird populations around the airfield. Additionally, if mission requirements permit, flights could be scheduled to avoid peak hours of bird activity, said Lt. Col. Ken Ekman, 332 AEW Safety chief, who is deployed from Shaw AFB, S.C.

The Smithsonian will benefit from the whole bird shipment because of the 620,000 bird specimens that it currently has, only eight are from Iraq and those represent only four species, said Carla Dove, PhD, of the Smithsonian's Feather Lab.

"Whole bird samples are the basis of all taxonomic and systematic research on birds. The birds are skinned, stuffed with cotton and kept in the museum collection forever," she said. "Having these specimens available for study will be a great benefit to our identification program and to the study of birds of that region. When specimens are catalogued into our collections they are available for researchers all over the world to come to study, or to borrow for examination."

Another benefit of receiving whole birds, rather than 'snarge,' or "the bird 'ick' that remains after a bird strike," as Dr. Dove described it, is that experts can match unknown specimen feathers to whole bird samples.

"Whole specimens benefit the bird strike identification program tremendously," she said. "When we receive a bird strike sample, we immediately wash the feather because it usually has blood, tissue and other 'snarge' attached. Once the feather is back to its original shape, we compare it with whole bird samples that we have preserved in the collection for a perfect match. Today, we prepare the birds with spread wings and as flat skins so we can find every feather without having to manipulate a specimen that was prepared in a traditional manner with the wings tight against the body."

"I plan to also use these specimens [from Balad] to obtain the DNA sequence to add to our database," she said. "That way, even if we get a small blood or tissue sample that does not have feathers, we can possibly get an identification using the DNA."

While some of the types of birds sent from Balad are yet to be determined by Dr. Dove and the rest of the identification experts at the Feather Lab, they have been able to identify some by photographs taken by Sergeant Young. These include: white wagtails, white-cheeked bulbuls, falcated teals, Egyptian nightjars, black-headed gulls, blue-cheeked bee-eaters, white-breasted kingfishers, golden orioles, stone curlews, shrikes, European rollers, spur-winged plovers and red-wattled plovers. The rest will be identified after arriving in D.C.

In the end, the science behind identification will help the safety personnel at Balad to better understand the local area airpower challengers.

"By understanding the exact species of birds that cause problems to aircraft and flight safety, we can begin to do things to prevent the damage from occurring. You must know what the species of birds are that are causing problems before you can do anything about it. It's just like any kind of pest management," Dr. Dove said.

"The same is true for bird problems on airfields. The flight safety group will use the data to understand the movements and migratory patterns of birds and to know which bird species are causing problems. Species identification is the first step in bird strike prevention," she said.

For pilots, the experience of hitting a bird can be troubling.

"Hitting a bird while flying is difficult to describe. When you're flying 200 to 300 knots, you either never see the bird or you see just streaks of black as they fly by. The unsettling part is not knowing the extent of the damage when you know you've hit one," said Captain Baumgart, who is deployed from Spangdahlem Air Base, Germany.

"Not too long ago, I hit a [large hawk] on my approach to landing. What concerned me was that I never even saw it; I just felt a dull thud. After landing, the crew said the bird was wrapped around the top of my nose gear. Another six, or maybe nine inches higher, and it would have gone right down the intake, destroying the motor. There was minor damage to the nose gear," the captain said.

While the Balad safety personnel realize that eliminating the threat of bird strikes altogether is impossible, they are doing their best to mitigate the risks of bird strikes occurring.

"Safety is about reacting to mishaps and preventing future mishaps," Colonel Ekman said. "The Smithsonian lacks specimens and data on bird migratory patterns in Iraq. By feeding the Smithsonian info and helping them build their database for species collection, we in turn can be much more preventative in our to actions counter Balad's bird population."

For Sergeant Young, it's a matter of risk management.

"We can't get rid of it [the bird problem]; we can only try to minimize it," he said. "It's about making it safer for our pilots."

Still, the sergeant has learned a lot about his 'fowl' foes.

"I didn't even know there were different types of gulls - I thought they were all seagulls," he explained of one of the types of birds that commonly collide with aircraft here. 'I've learned more about birds here than I have in my whole life -- their habitats and migratory patterns."

More importantly he's learning how to combat them to keep American pilots and airplanes safer in the skies over Iraq.