We all want to be one in a million. How about one in a billion? You could be a forensic ornithologist! What? Well, in this age of CSI, anything with "forensic" in the title is irresistibly sexy.
Bird strikes have posed an enormous threat to airplanes from the time of Orville Wright. But before you grab the airsickness bag in the seat pocket in front of you and develop an irrational fear of flying, remember that bird strikes are common, and engineers have designed jets to take up to five pounds of bird. (That more than covers tiny songbirds or even a goose.) Still, when a bird hits a plane, the consequences can be dire, like in the 2009 Miracle on the Hudson, when a routine commuter flight landed safely and relatively smoothly after intersecting with an entire flock of migrating Canada geese.
When that happens, it's time to call in the experts — the world's premier forensic ornithologists are based out of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. Behind the scenes, the museum isn't only dealing with ancient artifacts. Ongoing research takes place. Under fluorescent lights, big white boxes are filled with shelf after shelf of archived bird carcasses, tagged with detailed labels and shaped into narrow, torpedo−like bodies lined up side by side.
Welcome to the Division of Birds. There is only one lab in the world devoted exclusively to bird strike identifications, the Feather Identification Lab, in which four scientists churn out about 6,000 identifications per year and up to 300 cases a week during peak migration in the fall. Research assistant Marcy Heacker explains that airlines will send her "what we call ‘snarge,' a contraction of snot and garbage. Basically, it's the mess of blood and tissue and yuck left over when a bird hits a plane." Yum.
It makes sense that such an operation is run out of the Smithsonian, which has the world's third−largest collection of taxidermied specimens. The collection dates to the 1800s, well before the advent of airplanes. The scientists at the Feather Identification Lab used to perform identifications by looking at the morphology of the whole feather, and particularly at the fluffy down, under a microscope. They compare feather fragments from bird strikes to the specimens in the archives.
More recently, the lab has switched to DNA technology to return more specific results. Still, old fashioned identification can provide a valuable system of checks and balances; geneticist Nor FaridahDahlan recalls that on one of her first days on the job, she received a sample from a damaged Air Force case.
"I'd run the sample multiple times, and it kept coming back, ‘DEER,' and I thought, oh no! I'm supposed to be getting ‘BIRD,'" she said.
While most common, birds aren't the only wildlife strikes that threaten aviation, and large animals like deer do get hit during take−off and landing, like a car accident. But the pilot in this case insisted that it occurred in the air.
"Yes, I remember I was exactly 1500 feet up and I remember the pop, and then there was a hole in my wing," he said.
The whole incident occurred shortly after Christmas, and Dahlan likes to joke that the plane struck Rudolph. (The forensic ornithologists had to piece together all the clues and eventually found that the plane had hit a turkey vulture. The vulture had just eaten a deer and still had deer tissue in its crop.)
Solving mysteries, saving lives … sound glamorous? Unfortunately, your job prospects are pretty slim, since the Smithsonian lab has just four staff scientists and is the only one in the world. You might not see "forensic ornithologist" pop up in Career Connect anytime soon.
--
Alyson Yee is a senior majoring in biology and French. She can be reached at Alyson.Yee@tufts.edu.
