Animal experts used to ID birds in plane strikes

CHICAGO -- When animals are the prime suspects in a whodunit, who gets on the case? Turns out the nation's top natural history museums are often the go-to gumshoes in capers where feathers are the smoking guns and some stiffs have four legs.

The sometime animal CSIs most recently identified the birds that slammed into US Airways Flight 1549 over New York, shredding its jet engines and forcing Capt. Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger to successfully ditch in the Hudson River -- saving all 155 people aboard.

It was clear soon enough after the Jan. 15 accident that the ill-fated fowl were Canada geese. What wasn't known was whether they were migratory or homebody geese -- a critical distinction as airports devise strategies to shoo them away from aircraft.

That's where the museums came in.

From hummingbirds up

John Bates holds a Royal Sunangle hummingbird that is part of the Field's collection of birds.

The Feather Identification Lab at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington served as lead detective, while Chicago's Field Museum -- best known for its T. rex skeleton named Sue -- provided feathery evidence.

"We try to tell people we're here for a reason -- and this case helps demonstrate that," said ornithologist John Bates, who works with the Field Museum's 480,000-bird collection. It includes hummingbirds, 5-foot ostriches and everything in between.

Rows of cabinets on the 116-year-old museum's sprawling second floor hold specimens of 90 percent of the world's 10,000 bird species. But the Field's 2,700 samples of Canada geese -- including some who migrated from the eastern Canada region of Labrador -- were the key to cracking the case.

At the Smithsonian's request, Field ornithologists sent Labrador goose feathers and tissue to Washington, where tests showed the culprits in the near tragedy on the Hudson were indeed the Labrador type -- not New York varieties that largely stay put year-round.

The findings, published in the June 8 edition of the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, mean New York airports may have to develop one method to keep high-flying migratory geese away from planes and another for the birds that nest in the city.

"A lot of people say, 'Who cares about knowing the bird type?'" said Carla Dove, the aptly named program director at the Feather Identification Laboratory. "But that's critical. The strategies differ according to species. If you have starlings or turkey vultures, you deal with it differently."

Authorities may manage resident birds by harassing and culling them or modifying their habitat. Dealing with transient birds may require more elaborate methods, including recording their flight patterns or employing sensitive radar that detects their movement over runways.

Other kinds of cases

The US Airways bird strike isn't the only case Field scientists have cracked over the years.

Authorities have sought their assistance in identifying animals smuggled into the U.S. and the feathers on headdresses brought in by tourists who may not have known they were fashioned from endangered birds, explained another museum ornithologist, Dave Willard.

His detective work included once trying to decipher how many pieces of chicken were in a meal that may have been eaten by a suspect in one of suburban Chicago's most notorious murders -- the slaying of seven people inside a Brown's Chicken restaurant.

His comparison of the leftovers found in the garbage with chicken bones in Field's collection was inconclusive -- though Willard still testified at the 2007 trial of suspect Juan Luna, who was later convicted.

Requests for Field detective services have tapered off over the past decade, in part because federal wildlife and other labs have taken up much of the slack.

When Chicago police shot a 150-pound cougar last summer after many residents had pooh-poohed sightings as an urban legend, a Cook County forensics lab conducted the post-mortem exams. But the big cat's remains are kept at the Field Museum for further study.

The Smithsonian's four-employee feather lab is busier than ever, though, as the number of bird-plane collisions has soared. Pilots have reported hitting more than 59,700 birds since 2000, most often mourning doves, gulls, European starlings and American kestrels.

Every week, dozens of bird carcasses, parts or merely gooey remnants arrive by mail after they've been scrapped off damaged plane engines. Bird-strike cases processed by the unit jumped to more than 4,500 in 2008 from around 300 in 1989, Dove said.

The lab has a success rate of more than 90 percent in identifying birds and solves many cases in just hours using a database of bird DNA. But the US Airways strike involved multiple birds who weighed an average of 8 pounds, and it took Dove and her team months to sift through 69 bags of remains.

Without the Field's goose collection, pinpointing the precise type of Canada geese could have taken longer, possibly forcing researchers to travel to breeding grounds themselves to gather samples, Dove said.

She agreed the US Airways case shows that bird collections, many compiled over more than a century, aren't just an academic indulgence.

"Sometimes people on the street don't see how this work can be applied to their lives," she said. "Here, we can see these collections can be used for an immediate improvement in public safety. That's incredible."