Everyone is talking about the danger of bird strikes and airplanes today. This has been a problem for planes for years but I guess it took the crash landing of the USAirways flight into the Hudson River for the general public to take this seriously. See this amazing video of the plane landing in the water.
I knew a falconer who flew her birds at JFK as part of a bird control program — that airport has employed falconers for years. This, in addition to altering the habitat so that it’s less attractive to some birds will go a long way toward keeping birds out of the flight paths of planes that are landing or taking off.
Heard an interview on NPR’s All Things Considered with a woman from the feather identification lab at the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum of Natural History who works on figuring out what kinds of birds hit planes. She studies the snarge — that’s the bird goo that is wiped off an aircraft after it hits a bird. Now there’s a job.
Falconer on the Edge 