How JFK airport keeps birds out of plane's way

Working to Separate Big and Small Fliers
Michael Wilson, The New York Times 31 Dec 09;

SHE was driving on the grounds of Kennedy International Airport and talking about the importance of keeping the grass 6 to 10 inches long when she spotted something out of the corner of her eye: a sea gull, standing on the tip of a runway. She hit the gas and cranked the steering wheel and charged straight for it.

The bird flew away. The driver, Laura C. Francoeur, paused in a “now where was I?” way, then resumed her tutorial on how to keep birds away from airplanes.

Ms. Francoeur, 41, is the chief wildlife biologist for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which oversees New York City’s airports. Nearly a year since the double-bird strike that led to Capt. Chesley B. Sullenberger III’s smooth ditching of a US Airways jetliner in the Hudson River, Ms. Francoeur described the many tools — some high-tech, some deadly, some just glorified noisemakers and broomsticks — that she uses to prevent such crises from happening.

She and other wildlife supervisors patrol Kennedy’s runways in S.U.V.’s and carry shotguns. There is a time to shoo a bird away, she explained, and a time to shoot it out of the sky.

All airports must deal with the threat of bird strikes, but at Kennedy, which was built in wetlands, the relationship with wildlife is particularly lively and complicated. Take the aforementioned gull. Gulls love Kennedy. They scoop clams from adjacent Jamaica Bay and drop them on the tarmac, where the shells pop open to reveal the tasty treat. There are clamshells all over the runways.

Unlike those that disrupted Captain Sullenberger’s flight last Jan. 15, most bird strikes are not witnessed by pilots, but discovered by the wildlife team upon recovering the carcass. There have been fewer than 100 per year over Kennedy for most of the last decade, down from 315 in 1988 and 314 in 1989, thanks largely to the airport’s depredation — lethal shooting — program, started in 1991.

That is just one of many tools in Ms. Francoeur’s toolbox.

PYROTECHNICS They look like the fat revolvers from a Dick Tracy strip, but the pistols the wildlife supervisors carry on J.F.K.’s runways do not fire bullets. They are noisemakers that shoot two different rounds, depending on the species of bird the person wants to scare away — the “whistler,” which emits a harsh Fourth-of-July-type screech, and the “banger,” which, as the name suggests, bangs.

TRAPS The airport traps “mostly what they call ‘nuisance birds’ — pigeons, starlings and house sparrows,” Ms. Francoeur said. One trap is shaped like a funnel. “They walk in and get disoriented,” she said. “They just walk around the edges. They kind of walk around the exit point, they just keep missing it.”

BIRDS OF PREY From May to November, falcons are deployed to scare off smaller birds. The falcons are teased with a lure that looks like a bird they preys upon, setting the falcon into a series of dives as if it were hunting. “Birds see this from a distance away, they see this falcon is in hunting mode, and theoretically, they don’t want anything to do with that part of the airport,” Ms. Francoeur said. Falcons are not supposed to actually kill birds, but they do from time to time. “It’ll go for retraining,” Ms. Francoeur said.

CLIPPERS Six to 10 inches is a “happy medium” for the grass near the runways. If the grass is allowed to get too tall, it might attract small mammals, and that in turn will attract raptors, a type of bird the airport wants to keep at a minimum, Ms. Francoeur said. “If you keep it too short, certain birds like really short grass so they can watch for predators. Gulls like to sit in short grass so they can see everything around them.”

LASER The airport bought a hand-held laser device from a French company, Lord Imaging, that shines a thin, green beam. “Birds perceive the bright green beam as a long and big stick coming their way and the only alternative they have to avoid the blow is to fly away,” the company states on its Web site. “This is a survival reflex, the same reflex as a bird flying away as a car approaches.”

HELIKITE Part balloon, part kite, this little device, from a family-owned English company, floats in the air and simulates a predatory bird. Smaller birds flee.

NOISE The airport has special vehicles equipped with loudspeakers on the roof that send out a recording of a gull in distress that researchers found in a Cornell University library. “We have two species: the laughing gull and the herring gull,” Ms. Francoeur said. “They will fly in and investigate to see what’s going on, and then you fire the pyrotechnic into the flock.”

It’s important to remember to turn off the recording right away. “If you just keep playing the distress call over and over, it’s like crying wolf,” she said. “Gulls seem very adept at figuring things like that out.”

CABBIE CONTROL Kennedy has a robust, to put it mildly, waiting area for cab drivers seeking fares, out of sight of travelers. There the cabbies pray, nap, play soccer, throw dice — and eat takeout from a little cafe. Gulls swoop like dive bombers for scraps. Ms. Francoeur and her staff regularly visit the drivers and ask them not to feed the birds, and have posted signs imploring the same in English, Spanish and French Creole.

SHOTGUNS The most effective means of preventing bird strikes remains the good old 12-gauge shotgun. Ms. Francoeur’s team killed 1,093 birds this year, a record (up from 265 in 1991, when shooting began). Shooters are trained and retrained on what birds they can shoot and which are protected.

YANKEE INGENUITY Fish scales on the airport grounds = bad sign. It turned out that osprey were nesting on a complex radio antenna that the wildlife supervisors were forbidden to interfere with. “I needed something nonmetallic,” Ms. Francoeur recalled. She and others rigged up a system of PVC pipes and nylon lines around the antenna last year that made it impossible for osprey to get comfortable enough to eat their freshly caught fish, much less nest.