If it flies and shares the skies with aircraft, Carla Dove can identify it.

Meet Carla Dove, who has led NMNH’s Feather Identification Lab to be the busiest and best bird-strike identification lab in the world. If it flies and shares the skies with aircraft, she and her team can identify it–even if all that’s left is a spoonful of snarge.

Go down a hallway and up an elevator at the National Museum of Natural History, walk through a door that says, “Bird Division,” and you’ll come across a Raiders of the Lost Ark-style storage room, packed wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling with storage lockers filled with once-living birds. The museum houses one of the largest bird collections in the world: more than half a million specimens, dating back to the late 19th century, representing nearly 10,000 species, or greater than 80 percent of the species of birds on Earth.

A set of mourning warblers from the collection. The Smithsonian collects multiples of each species because single species can greatly vary in shape and color. (Photo by Ben Marcus)

Collectors ranging from Spencer Fullerton Baird, the first curator of the Smithsonian, to President Teddy Roosevelt could not have known how the carefully labeled birds they collected would be used by future scientists, but they no doubt would have been astonished to see how Carla Dove, the manager of the museum’s Feather Identification Lab, and her colleagues, use the collection to solve a very modern problem: how planes, helicopters and other flying craft can avoid slamming into birds in the air.

Bird strikes are a serious issue. In the past 20 years, aircraft have struck animals with increasing frequency—more than 200,000 times. Bird strikes not only hurt native bird populations, but they also damage aircraft to the amount of hundreds of millions of dollars in repairs and losses each year. In the most well-known recent example, a flock of Canada geese disabled both engines on a U.S. Airways flight piloted by Capt. “Sully” Sullenberger, who famously ditched the plane in the Hudson River.

On January 15, 2009, US Airways Flight 1549 struck a flock of birds shortly after takeoff from LaGuardia in New York, losing all engine power. Given their position in relation to the available airports and their low altitude, pilots Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger and Jeffrey Skiles decided to glide the plane to ditching on the Hudson River near Midtown Manhattan. All 155 people on board were rescued by nearby boats, with no deaths and few serious injuries. The time from the bird strike to the ditching was less than four minutes. (Photo courtesy NY Post)

Carla Dove’s Feather Identification Lab is the only lab like it in the world. Every day, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Navy, and the Air Force send the remains from bird strikes to Carla’s lab so she and her team can identify the species, using the Smithsonian’s massive collection as a reference. If her team can figure out what kind of bird struck a particular aircraft, the airport or military base where the incident occurred can shift their flight schedules and flight paths and modify surrounding terrain to try to reduce the chance that birds and aircraft will collide in the future.

When Eye on Science contacted Carla for this story, she immediately invited us into the lab because, as she said, “I like to bring people in here because it’s a lot easier to explain if they can actually see it.”

The tour begins in the museum’s rotunda, where the famous African bush elephant, named Henry, has served as a rendezvous point for generations of museum visitors. Carla, dressed in Smithsonian yellow, immediately makes us feel welcome with her ebullience and her Virginia-born southern charm. In the lab we meet research assistants James Whatton and Ingrid Rochon who stad under bright lights at a table covered with plastic baggies, feathers, and bird specimens, trying to identify feathers that arrived that day.

Part of the bird identification lab team. From left: James Whatton, Ingrid Rochon, and Carla Dove. (Photo by Ben Marcus)

The bird remains that arrive in the lab vary from whole feathers to bits of gunk that Dove’s team calls “snarge.” (Ed.note: Birds almost never win in their encounters with aircraft.) The team open each piece of mail, which includes a form describing the bird strike and a sealable plastic bag containing the corresponding bird remains. If the sample includes several bird feathers, the two researchers compare the feathers to birds in the collection to identify the species. If they can’t figure it out using their naked eye, they will bring the mystery feather to a microscope to find more clues. If all they receive is some snarge, the material goes across the hall to research assistant Faridah Dahlan, who analyzes the sample’s DNA.

Research assistant James Whatton confirms the feathers in front of him belong to a gray catbird. (Photo by Ben Marcus)

With nothing but a few feathers in hand, we asked James how he could possibly narrow down his search from 10,000 species to one, just by eye. With no hesitation, Carla replied, “experience.”  Carla and Jim, who have been at this for decades, possess an encyclopedic knowledge of bird plumage. The French anatomist Georges Cuvier once said he could reconstruct an animal’s skeleton from a single tooth—which may have been a tad hyperbolic—but Carla and her team come pretty close with bird feathers. Ingrid is still new to the bird lab—her specialty is mammals, and she transferred to the bird lab just a few months ago, but she has a few decades to catch up.

Comparing a mystery feather to a known feather from the collection under a microscope. (Photo courtesy of NMNH)

When asked about their favorite cases, James laughed as he recalled a bird strike at 1,500 feet in the air where the DNA they recovered turned out to have come from a white-tailed deer.

“We went back to the U.S. Air Force and asked, ‘Are you sure this happened at 1,500 feet?’”  Carla says. The pilot confirmed the information was correct. Did they discover a flying deer? Not quite. It just so happened that the aircraft had struck a vulture that had recently had deer for lunch. James also mentioned the “bird remains that flew around the world.” Apparently, a plane struck an Anhinga (a type of water bird) in Florida and flew to Europe and back to the U.S. before the bird remains were discovered.

An anhinga drying its wings. (Photo by Ralph H. Benjebar)

Over in the molecular biology lab, Faridah Dahlan was preparing a sample of snarge for analysis. She made us laugh with her dry wit as she placed pieces of snarge in tiny trays for analysis, while chatting about the value of communicating science to non-scientists, especially children. She said Carla is a “natural” at this skill.

Faridah Dahlan prepares snarge samples for DNA analysis. (Photo by Ben Marcus)

Research technician Nor Faridah Dahlan with frozen tissue samples. (Photo by Donald E. Hurlbert / NMNH)

Carla Dove has led the Feather Identification Lab to its status as the busiest and most experienced bird strike identification lab in the world. It is hard to anticipate the future of her field—forensic ornithology—as technology improves and new challenges arise. One thing is certain: Climate change is also affecting this line of work. “Because temperatures are rising [globally], we’re seeing bird strikes in the north from birds that previously weren’t in the area,” Carla says. Therefore, “enhancing and maintaining bird collections like the one at the museum is more important than ever. As long as there are birds and planes on this planet, the Smithsonian’s journey of collecting birds and using them to investigate bird strikes will continue.”

Eye on Science, our new biweekly series, will shine a light on our vast and varied body of work by bringing Smithsonian science into sharper focus. Eye on Science will tell the stories of the people behind the research, the discoveries they make and their inspiration. We will explore their passions, celebrate their contributions, and look more closely at how questions become solutions that can inform environmental policy, spur technological innovation, and promote community and collaboration across the globe.

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