ASW – Day 1
Environmental Safety
Today is the first day of Airport Safety Week. Every day of this week, you can expect short emails from Administration discussing the day’s theme and sharing the occasional safety tip. Please share this with your team, and if you have any tips you’d like included in the next day’s email, send them our way! Check the end of the day’s post for tomorrow’s theme.
Today’s topic is Environmental Safety. We’re going to look at some of the wildlife you might find around the airport and how to safely coexist with them, then we’ll look at what to do when it comes to spills on airport property.
Kamloops Airport is home to a variety of animals, but we want to focus on our three all-stars, the big players of the YKA aerodrome: deer, the Canada Goose, and osprey.
Weighing between 70kg and 120kg, deer are North America’s most populous large mammal apart from humans. Kamloops Airport offers a vast, flat, grassy airfield that deer love to visit, but pose a serious threat to incoming or outgoing aircraft. Moving quickly and becoming frightened easily, deer are unpredictable animals that can cause significant damage to aircraft actively landing or taking off. They are typically only seen as individuals on the airfield, one deer leaping over the perimeter fence to sample the grasses of the aerodrome.
Despite only weighing ~5kg, 65kg less massive than deer, the Canada Goose poses a more constant, and by extension, a more serious risk than our transient deer. Five kilos of majesty and bad attitude, geese pose a more significant threat by travelling in groups called ’gaggles’. These gaggles can be 100 geese strong, but usually are only seen at the airport in gaggles of up to thirty geese. They frequently stop by YKA for one reason: grass.
That’s right, geese love the airfield for the same reason as the deer, abundant food and flat land that offers a wide view of any potential predators nearby. Unlike deer, geese inhabit the same domain as aircraft: the sky. Flying geese, even when not in great numbers, can cause major damage to aircraft during any stage of takeoff or landing, and must be dispersed before aviation activities can take place
Geese pose the same threat to the airfield as YKA’s final prominent wildlife member: Osprey. Smaller cousins of hawks, an osprey is less massive than a goose. Usually weighing around 1.8kg, and only appearing in groups of two, these birds pose a different kind of threat to YKA: they nest in one location permanently. Two ospreys have made a home on the northeast side of the airport, where they return year after year to hunt mice and other small rodents in the grasses of the airfield, as well as fish from the nearby Thompson River. Birds of prey, osprey routinely make fast, unpredictable dives across the airfield in search of prey before returning to their nest to eat. Unlike geese, osprey cannot be easily dispersed as they are protected legally by the B.C. Wildlife Act. Established nests cannot be disturbed or destroyed while occupied, so Kamloops Airport makes a yearly effort to remove any osprey nests when the birds and their hatchlings travel south for the winter. Despite our best efforts and vain negotiations, these tenacious animals return in the spring and reestablish nests quickly.
If you see any one of these critters swinging by the airfield in search of lunch, let Airport Administration know right away! Our specialized team of Airport Technicians have training and experience in escorting foolhardy deer, mean tempered geese, and stubborn osprey off the away from airplanes and off the airfield, helping travelling public and the animals stay safe. Thanks for keeping us and our four-legged visitors safe, APTs!