Carla Dove and the “Bird Detectives” at the National Museum of Natural History

In the hallways of the National Museum of Natural History—past the bathrooms, the cafeteria, and the exhibition spaces—you will find a door that is nondescript save for a sign above that says, “Bird Division.” Walk through this door and you will come across a room packed wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling with storage lockers. Each one is filled with once-living birds.

Naturalists ranging from Spencer Fullerton Baird (the first curator of the Smithsonian) to President Teddy Roosevelt traveled the world collecting bird specimens to share them with the people of the United States. But they did not exactly know how these birds would be used in the future. Fast forward more than 100 years and you will find Carla Dove, the manager of the museum’s Feather Identification Lab, and her colleagues, using the collection to solve a rather modern problem—how to keep planes and helicopters from striking birds in the air.

Between 1990 and 2019, U.S. aircraft struck animals more than 225,000 times, most often during landing. These strikes led to hundreds of thousands of bird deaths and over a billion dollars in damage to aircraft. In the most famous example in recent memory, in 2009, a flock of Canada geese brought down an entire jet airliner over the Hudson River. Those geese are now stored in the museum’s collection.

The Feather Identification Lab has one of the largest bird collections in the world and contains more than half a million specimens, dating back to the late 19th century. The specimens represent nearly 10,000 species—greater than 80 percent of the species of birds on Earth.

Every day, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Navy, and the Air Force send bird remains from bird strikes to the lab so Dove 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 can shift their flight schedules, flight paths, and surrounding terrain to try and reduce the chance that birds and aircraft will collide in the future. 

The bird remains that arrive in the lab range from whole feathers to bits of gunk that Dove’s team calls “snarge.” The team opens each piece of mail, which includes a form describing the bird strike and a sealable plastic bag containing the corresponding bird’s remains. If the sample includes bird feathers, they compare the feathers to birds in the collection to identify the species. If they cannot figure it out using their naked eye, they will examine the mystery feather under a microscope to find more clues. If all they receive is some snarge, the material goes across the hall to the DNA lab.

In one particularly interesting case, the lab received bird remains from a strike at 1,500 feet in the air. The DNA they recovered turned out to have come from a white-tailed deer. Dove said, “we went back to the U.S. Air Force and said, ‘are you sure this happened at 1,500 feet?’” The pilot confirmed the information was correct. It turned out that the aircraft had struck a vulture that recently had deer for lunch.

Dove’s field, called “forensic ornithology,” continues to play an important role in aviation safety, even as technology improves and new challenges arise. Climate change is one of those challenges. According to Dove, “because temperatures are rising, we’re seeing bird strikes in the North from birds that previously weren’t in the area.” Therefore, she continued, “enhancing and maintaining bird collections like the one at the museum is more important than ever. As long as there are birds, planes, and helicopters on this planet, the Smithsonian’s journey of collecting birds and using them to investigate bird strikes will continue.”