A sharpshooter and a burned sausage factory are playing key roles in keeping airplanes from slamming into white-tailed deer at a south central Wisconsin airport.
The unlikely critter control combination offers a glimpse into the Watertown Municipal Airport's effort to address aircraft vs. wildlife encounters, an issue that airfields across the state and around the world deal with daily.
In Watertown, a city of about 24,000 about 50 miles northwest of Milwaukee, so many white-tailed deer were showing up at the 360-acre airport that a year ago, after securing the proper permissions, officials asked a sharpshooter to come in and thin the herd. A year later, the sharpshooter has taken 21 deer off the property.
"We've got lots of deer out here," said Jeff Baum, chief executive of Wisconsin Aviation, which runs the Watertown Airport. "We've been fortunate in that we haven't had a deer-airplane accident for some time now. But we have certainly had aircraft that have had to do a go-around because of deer on the runway or in close proximity to the runway.
"We want to be proactive on this," Baum said. "We don't want to wait for an accident to happen. We want to eliminate the problem before anyone gets hurt."
Eliminating the deer problem in places like Watertown is difficult. Nature continues to do a great job replenishing the population. "We had a lot of (deer) twins out on the airport this year," said Krys Brown, facilities manager at the Watertown airport.
The effort to control the herd goes beyond the sharpshooter's work. That's where the burned sausage plant enters the story.
In May, a fire destroyed a large portion of the Johnsonville Sausage plant in Watertown. The fire's cause is believed to have been electrical, said Chief Gregory Michalek of the Watertown Fire Department.
The fire damage was so extensive that the company has chosen to move the plant, one of five the company operates, to a new location in Watertown.
Johnsonville, based in Sheboygan Falls, employs 120 people in Watertown. After the fire, the company decided to keep all its Watertown employees on the payroll to do training and community service work during the transition to the new sausage plant.
Baum and the airport staff asked Johnsonville whether any of its workers could come out to the airport and cut brush and trees that the deer on the property use for habitat and cover.
"They said, 'Sure. That would be great,'" Baum said. "They've been out here and just done a great job. It helps eliminate the habitat at the airport for the deer population."
Johnsonville has paid the workers throughout the process, and its employees have tallied about 500 hours of community service at the airport and at other projects throughout the area since the fire, a company spokeswoman said. The company's new sausage plant in Watertown should be up and running by spring.
While birds make up the overwhelming majority of wildlife struck by planes, white-tailed deer are the most commonly struck non-bird species, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. Nearly 1,000 white-tailed deer were hit by planes in the United States from 1990 to 2013, causing an estimated $43.9 million in damage, according to an FAA/U.S. Department of Agriculture database.
"Elevated deer populations in the United States represent an increasingly serious threat to both commercial and general aviation aircraft," the FAA said in an air safety alert issued several years ago that remains in effect.
Baum knows firsthand what an encounter with a deer and a plane is like.
Several years ago, a plane he was piloting had just landed. "Two deer ran in front of us," he said. "We were able to avoid one. We were slowing as fast as we could," but the second deer ran through the left engine of the turboprop aircraft. (A turboprop's engine turns a propeller that produces thrust allowing the plane to move through the air.)
"The deer obviously got the worst of it," Baum said. Still, the repair bill for the airplane exceeded $50,000, he said.
Such encounters are precisely what Scott Kirchoff is trying to prevent. A hunter safety instructor for nearly two decades, Kirchoff is a sharpshooter who volunteers his time to take deer off the Watertown Airport property.
"The first night I sat out there, I counted 14 deer," he said.
So far, he has taken 21 deer with a total of 22 shots. He could have taken twice that number, he said, but he passes on all shots that do not present a perfect set of circumstances to drop an animal in its tracks, he said. That includes being sensitive to people who live and work in vicinity of the airport.
"Safety is the number one priority," he said.
He added that all the deer taken off the property have been used for food. "Nothing has gone to waste," he said.
So why not simply build a fence around the airport? That's not necessarily easy and it is definitely not cheap.
The FAA recommends that a deer fence be 10 to 12 feet high with three strands of barbed wire set outrigger-style on the top of the fence.
Milwaukee's Mitchell International Airport is surrounded by a 10-foot high chain link fence with another 2 feet of barbed wire on top. The fence is also buried two feet down to prevent burrowing animals from making their way onto airport property.
The price for the fencing in recent years has ranged between $23.40 to $27.10 per foot, Ryan McAdams, marketing manager for Mitchell International, said in an email. The price varies depending on the complexity of terrain where the fence is being installed as well as other factors, McAdams said.
Milwaukee's Timmerman Airport is surrounded by an 8-foot chain link fence with 2 feet of barbed wire on top and another 2 feet underground.
Madison's Dane County Regional Airport is surrounded by a 10-foot fence, which is taller in a few places, said Brent McHenry, marketing director for the airport.
Deer can typically jump about 8 feet high, but "I've seen literature that they could jump as high as 12 feet," said Brad Koele, a wildlife damage specialist with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.
"We have gone to a 12-foot fence," around some areas of the airfield, said Abe Weber, airport director in Appleton and president of the Wisconsin Airport Management Association.
Preventing aircraft from colliding with wildlife is a major concern of airport managers in the state, he said.
"Wildlife is on the top of our minds always," said Kurt Stanich, director of the Waukesha County Airport in Waukesha. "Aircraft are designed to fly and land, not hit things."
In recent years, the Waukesha airport has eliminated areas of trees and brush near the property that deer would use as a refuge when they were chased off the airport property, Stanich said.
The west end of the airport has a 10-foot-high fence. The remainder of the airport has a 7-foot fence. That's usually enough to keep deer off the property, but, "They can jump that 7-foot fence," Stanich said. "It is unreal. Without even a running start, they just jump."
Removing the habitat has also cut down on the birds and coyotes on the airport grounds, Stanich said.
In Watertown, Kirchoff plans to continue working to cull the deer herd to help ensure the safety of those who use the airport.
"This is going to be an ongoing process," he said. "I've got a pretty important job to do."
Original article can be found here: http://www.jsonline.com
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment