HAM TAKES TO THE SKIES
How Pigs Stopped Birds from Damaging Airplanes
On January 15, 2009, US Airways Flight 1549 took off from LaGuardia Airport in New York on its way to Seattle. It didn’t get very far. As the plane made its ascent, a flock of Canada geese struck the plane, taking out its engines. Fortunately, the pilots—Chesley Sullenberger and Jeffrey Skiles—were somehow able to glide the plane safely into the Hudson River. While one hundred of the one hundred and fifty-five passengers and crew on board suffered injuries, there were no fatalities. The accident was dubbed the “Miracle on the Hudson,” a testament to the crew’s quick thinking under pressure.
While the events of that day are an extreme example of what can go wrong, bird-related aircraft accidents are hardly rare. According to a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) report from 2016, there are approximately 13,000 such incidents in the US annually. The vast majority of these bird strikes are harmless (if a seagull goes up against a plane hull, the bird is going to lose) but the exceptions require countermeasures. Even if no one is hurt, if a bird hits a plane just right, it can cause hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage and require that the plane make an emergency landing. Airports typically employ loudspeakers and pyrotechnics to disrupt bird colonies that may affect a plane, but there’s no substitute for keeping the populations under control in the first place. Sometimes that’s simply impossible: In the case of Flight 1549, one can’t just prevent Canada geese from migrating up the Atlantic coast. In some cases however, airports can take action to relocate a flock.
One great example involved a hunting club in Salt Lake City. In 1999, the club established a colony of about 10,000 gulls on an island north of Salt Lake City’s airport. At the time, no one realized how bad this was. According to the airport’s “wildlife hazard management plan,” the birds’ daily flight pattern became a path “directly over the airport’s center and east runways.” This required a creative intervention. Step one was straightforward: Remove the nests. However, this proved to be a temporary solution, as the gulls returned to the island to lay more eggs. They then tried something called “egg addling.” The mother gulls were scared off the island and, while they were away, wildlife management covered the temporarily abandoned eggs in vegetable oil. Per the Deseret News, this “blocks oxygen and prevents the eggs from hatching.” Some gulls learned that their eggs wouldn’t hatch on the island, so they moved on to other habitats—but there were holdouts. So Salt Lake City brought in the pigs.
Pigs are voracious and indiscriminate eaters; in other words, they’ll eat just about anything—and eggs are most certainly on that list. So, airport officials brought some in to finish off the job. Per the BBC, the animals “trampled and ate the gulls’ eggs.” And this solution has staying power. The BBC continued: “[Pigs] are now used for a few weeks every spring as a deterrent. The migrating gulls arrive, see the pigs waiting to eat their eggs, and then go to another location.” As it turns out, while pigs don’t fly, they can help people take to the skies more safely.