Jet is a one-and-a-half-year-old Harris hawk with a straightforward mission: to scare local birds away from runways at Manas International Airport outside of Bishkek. Employed by the US Air Force, operator of the Manas Transit Center, the hawk is a key component in the BASH (Bird Aircraft Strike Hazard) program, designed to stop birds from colliding with aircraft on takeoff or landing.
She is a busy raptor. Every month, the Air Force runs over 500 flights transporting 36,000 American troops and over 10 million gallons of jet fuel through Manas in support of the war in Afghanistan. Most air passengers are comfortably unaware of the hazard stray birds pose to their flights. But for pilots and airport administrators, they are a constant menace.
Bird strikes have caused accidents around the world, perhaps most famously the so-called "Miracle on the Hudson," when Canada geese disabled the engines of an Airbus A320 soon after takeoff from New York's LaGuardia airport in January 2009. Though no one died in that accident, a similar 1995 strike in Alaska left 24 dead.
"Bird strikes are a big problem. They are definitely a threat to aircraft," says Captain Carl McBurnett, the Flight Safety Officer at Manas. Between October 2009 and July this year, 59 bird strikes caused over $348,000 in recorded damages to American aircraft at Manas, McBurnett noted. Most strikes happen just a few meters above the ground during landing and takeoff. By chasing birds off the runway the BASH program also helps civilian passenger planes flying in and out of Manas, though local airlines do not disclose information about bird-strike-related damage.
A wide variety of local and migrating birds are attracted to Manas and the surrounding farmland, says Jet's trainer Stephen Farrell, a falconer contracted to Manas from Phoenix Bird Control Services in Suffolk, England. "We have rooks, Eurasian rollers, rose-colored starlings, bee eaters, pigeons, crows as well as hawks, eagles and geese," says Farrell, who has been at Manas since 2007. "Bats are a major problem, but such smaller animals tend to do less damage to the aircraft."
In cooler weather, Farrell flies a seven-year-old lanner falcon, Peach. His birds are specially trained, raised around aircraft and thus not afraid of noises from the jet engines.
A diet of frozen one-day-old chicks keeps Jet and Peach coming back to Farrell. "They're a bit like dogs," and "exceptionally greedy," he says of his raptors, which he weighs regularly to keep in ideal hunting condition. "Keep them a little hungry so they'll come back, but you've also got to make sure they have energy and muscle."
In addition to the falconry, BASH includes "habitat mitigation" - mowing grass along airstrips where birds can nest or feed - and pyrotechnics to create loud, frightening noises. Every American airbase around the world has a similar program. One strategy is "cutting down any kind of bushes the birds can build nests in. Once you implement this it takes a few years for the birds to learn: 'Okay, we don't go to that airport because it's not a good place to live.' Then they don't end up on the runway when planes are trying to take off," says McBurnett.
BASH isn't just about preventing damage. The Air Force studies the strikes to help understand migratory patterns and modify behavior accordingly.
"We take note of every single bird we strike here at Manas," says McBurnett. "If we are able to capture a feather or some blood, a foot, we can send that to the Smithsonian's feather identification lab in Washington, D.C. They will run the DNA and sample the features and [tell us] what kind of bird it was. Therefore, if we know our migratory patterns around the airfield, we can say that [such a] bird hit at this point, maybe the migration is coming sooner. Something like that can help us figure out where our problems are and try to mitigate those birds."
Jet and Peach are the stars of the program. But there is one drawback to their job: their brief does not include catching, and savoring, their prey. "They'd get too fat," says Farrell.
David Trilling is the Central Asia news editor for EurasiaNet.
David Trilling is Eurasianet’s managing editor.
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