Lasers, Fireworks and Nets: How to Keep Owls Out of Jet Engines

The public loves snowy owls, but nobody wants to be in the next airliner that goes down in the Hudson River, which means the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey has the unenviable job of making them disappear. A plan to bring in “wildlife specialists” to shoot the owls who were showing up at the airports spawned a 3,000-signature petition, but given that the birds weren’t scared away by fireworks or people “driving at them,” the question still remains: how do you keep the large, airliner engine-clogging birds away from the airport? What the hell are they doing there anyway?

Experts think that the owls are drawn to airports because the airfield resembles their native Arctic tundra. The New York metro area airports are also rare oases of unused land in an otherwise dense urban area, and all three area airports—JFK, LaGuardia and Newark Liberty International—are near water, which attracts large, heavy and hazardous flocks of geese and gulls. The city is also located at the geographic nexus of the Atlantic Flyway, and over 200 species of birds pass through.

JFK, which was built on wetlands, has an especially difficult time with avian life coming to blows with aviation. Year-round wildlife specialists work to shoo away sea gulls that use the runways to crack open clams from nearby Jamaica Bay. And it’s not just birds; diamondback terrapins migrate across the tarmac to find a beach to nest, leading to flight delays, as the turtles are helped across the runways, more out of consideration for the turtles than fear for passenger safety.

Collisions between wildlife and airplanes cost the airline industry $650 million per year in America and over a billion dollars annually worldwide. An April 2009 study by the USDA Wildlife Services found that the number of airplane and wildlife collisions was on the rise—bad news but with a silver lining: part of the reason is that 13 of the 14 largest bird species in North America have shown significant population increases in the past 20 years. Airplanes have also gotten quieter, which is good news for people who live by the airport but bad news for birds.

Over the past two weeks, five planes at the airports were struck by snowy owls. Jeff Gordon, president of the American Birding Association told The Daily News that there are some years when no snowy owls are spotted in the mid-Atlantic states, “and then there are winters like this one,” where snowy owls have been spotted as far south as Bermuda.

Snowy owls are no doubt hefty, with five-foot wingspans and they appear to be drawn to airports; Boston’s Logan Airport has been trapping and relocating the owls for years, already catching 20 since November this year.

But the Port Authority couldn’t trap and relocate wildlife without permission from New York State, which it wasn’t able to get until Monday. In the meantime, snowy owls were added to the airport bird hit list, and two or three owls were shot over the weekend. Obviously there is some bureaucratic inefficiency at play here, but what else can be done to keep birds from being killed at airports, whether through guns or engine turbines?

Being next to the bay and Jamaica Bay Park limits what JFK can do to make the airport less attractive to wildlife. Passive defenses like bird spikes and netting were used to keep osprey from nesting around a sensitive radio antenna in 2009. The grass is kept between 6 to 10 inches in length, because, as chief wildlife biologist at JFK, Laura C. Francoeur, told The New York Times, “If you keep it too short, certain birds like really short grass so they can watch for predators,” she said, but long grass gives mammals a place to hide, attracting their predators.

But other more active bird deterrents, both old and new, have been used to keep the runways clear for takeoff. From May to November, trained falcons are brought in. The birds chase down lures (in theory), and the sight of a hunting falcon scares away. JFK also uses a combination helium balloon and kite called a Helikite for the same purposes.

It’s trickier to scare birds of prey like snowy owls though. Wildlife supervisors carry what look to be handguns that fire loud, potentially bird-scaring pyrotechnics (right, via USAF) but the snowy owls were reportedly unmoved by the display. Green-hued lasers are sometimes used to scare birds, because, according to the laser companies, "birds perceive the laser beam as a physical danger which is coming towards them. The only alternative to avoid being hit is flying away."

But the ineffective bird deterrent techniques combined with the legal barriers to trapping and moving owls left wildlife services reaching for the old standby—the shotgun. JFK wildlife specialists keep 12 gauges ready should it come to that, hence the very public backlash.

Elsewhere, Motherboard’s Victoria Turk wrote that researchers in Australia have proposed studying bird poop to determine what the birds are eating. Once you know that, you can adjust the habitat surrounding the airport in order to deter birds. Sequencing the DNA of bird droppings seems like enough of a deterrent for attempting this at New York metro airports, but the problems are more complicated than just tight budgets.

With poop DNA testing still decades away and potentially not totally applicable, the Port Authority is following the lead set by Boston's airport, which traps the owls to keep them out of airliner engines.

"We use a mouse or a bird in a cage to lure the owl into the net. Then we release them either north or south of the airport," Norman Smith of the Massachusetts Audubon Society told The Daily News. Smith has been trapping and releasing owls at Logan for over 30 years.

Smith went on to say that, given that owls don't live in large dense flocks like geese, the odds of one felling an airliner seem slim. Still the Port Authority isn't taking chances this year. Not every pilot is a Sully Sullenberger, ready to safely land a plane in the river. Plus, what could ruin a child's Christmas faster than seeing Harry Potter's owl Hedwig getting sucked into an airplane engine? Probably watching Hedwig getting gunned down cold. And that's why relocation makes a certain amount of intuitive sense.