Along with plenty of you, I was transfixed on Thursday as an epic story unfolded on the Hudson River in New York City.
A plane — U.S. Airways Flight 1549 — landed in the river. Passengers stood on the plane’s wings, were plucked out of the frigid water by boats and all 155 people aboard survived.
All in all, it was an amazing story, complete with a hero-in-the-making, pilot Chesley B. “Sully” Sullenberger, who gently glided the plane onto the Hudson.
The reported culprit: birds that apparently struck the plane’s jet engines, shutting them down.
Many were surprised by that news, including several people I spoke with here at 491 Main Street on Friday.
A bird? Two birds? How many birds does it take? Did you know that could happen?
And, perhaps most importantly in our little corner of the world, could that be a problem here?
Actually, the answer to all those questions is “Yes.”
Nearly a year ago, I sat down with Brad Allen, the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries & Wildlife’s bird group leader, and the biologist told me what he’d been up to that week.
Essentially, he’d been duck-rustling at Bangor International Airport.
Not for fun. Not for research. To help airport maintenance staffers keep the feathered critters away from the runways … and to avoid the kind of incident that took place in New York on Thursday.
On Friday, Allen was out of town and unavailable for comment on the New York incident, but the description of the situation that he gave in February is still worth hearing.
“[BIA] drains water off the runway into these lagoons, which never freeze,” Allen said at the time. “[Actually], it’s not really a lagoon, because that implies a pond. It’s a series of streams — culvert, stream, culvert — all the way to Union Street, and probably ultimately to Kenduskeag Stream.”
Allen said the open water was attractive to the ducks and recalled one trip to the airport when he saw about 500 ducks hunkered down in water that runs under the runways, and therefore rarely freezes.
As of February of 2008, Allen said he, along with airport personnel and federal fish and game agencies, had pitched in to trap, band and relocate 450 ducks. About 96 percent of those were mallards.
Before you decide to update your New Year’s resolutions and vow to never fly again, rest assured that wildlife interference is a priority at all airports, including BIA.
On Friday, Bill Lander, BIA’s supervisor of airfield maintenance (and, in the interest of full disclosure, a hunting buddy of mine), said that the scene is a bit different at the airport this year.
A cold snap is upon us, and the ducks that remain are up to their tail feathers in ice.
“Right now the ditch is almost completely frozen,” Lander said. “There are only a few [ducks] in there.”
Lander explained that BIA takes wildlife incursions seriously.
“We do the same kinds of things that every airport does,” Lander said, including using sound-making devices to drive birds and other animals away from the runways.
In addition, maintenance supervisors check the property for wildlife at least twice a day, and the runways and taxiways are also checked for hazards, which may include wildlife.
“Even the grass we plant here [is used because] it doesn’t attract birds,” Lander said.
Lander has worked at BIA for 34 years and remembers a wilder and more unpredictable era before the airport’s perimeter was completely fenced in.
The problem then wasn’t birds, but much bigger critters.
“When it was just woods [on the boundaries of the airport] it would be common to see deer out on the edge of the runways or taxiways,” Lander said. “For the last 20 years, since we’ve put that fence up, we’ve had very few deer here at the airport. I think the last time we had a deer here was about five years ago.”
Back in February Allen said some of those banded ducks were taken to Trenton but quickly found their way back to Bangor and the airport. Others were taken farther away — to Harpswell — in hopes that they wouldn’t return.
While an airport without flocks of resident ducks would undoubtedly be safer, Allen said at the time that the Bangor flock had apparently learned to stay away from planes.
“[The ducks] know the traffic pattern, fortunately,” Allen said. “They fly in and out of there without going across the runway. They’re fairly close to the National Guard helicopter operations, and that’s an issue, but [the ducks] are only coming in at dusk, so it’s predictable.”
At BIA, Lander said that effort to eliminate wildlife interference continues but is an ongoing challenge.
“We are monitoring [the duck situation]. It’s something that we do year-round,” Lander said. “In the summertime we don’t see it, but it’s always there. We are looking at other ways to control it in the future, whether it’s filling in the ditch or other means like that.”
With that said, Lander also realizes that there is only so much that BIA workers can do.
They talk to neighboring businesses and ask them to keep their dumpsters closed, for instance, hoping to keep crows and gulls away from the runways.
But it’s impossible to herd birds away from all the places that planes may fly.
“Migrating birds flying through, it’s extremely difficult to control that,” Lander said. “Especially if it’s flocks of birds.”
Lander said that at BIA, his department often fields calls that help them eliminate obvious problems.
“Typically what happens is it will be a plane taxiing or whatever that might see wildlife, and they’d notify the tower and they’d call us,” Lander said.
At that point, he and other maintenance staffers scramble to scare the offending wildlife away, if possible.
Until Thursday, few travelers likely thought twice about the possibility of a wayward goose or duck bringing down a passenger jet.
And I’ll bet that as today’s travelers boarded their planes and settled into window seats, they paid extra attention to the birds that flew nearby.
Lander said he and his staff keep a tally of birds that are struck by planes at BIA, and report them, as required, to the Federal Aviation Administration.
And despite all the work that’s done to prevent such incidents, they do happen.
“They’re rare in the wintertime,” Lander said. “There might be four or five in a year, if that … typically smaller birds.”
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