Carla Dove, head of the National Museum of Natural History’s Feather Identification Lab, is working on a mystery. Surrounded by racks of embalmed birds in jars, she digs through the contents of a red cooler, pushing aside paper and ice packs and finally opening a plastic garbage bag. Inside are ten samples of stomach contents from Burmese pythons captured in the Florida Everglades.
The majority of Dove’s work involves identifying birds hit by planes, a long-standing problem for aviation. “I mean, Wilbur Wright had a bird strike,” Dove says. Using DNA analysis and feather identification, she helps airports figure out which species to deter. Dove identified Canada geese as the cause of the emergency landing of US Airways Flight 1549 on the Hudson River in 2009.
But a few years ago, Dove received a call from Skip Snow, a wildlife biologist at Everglades National Park, with a different kind of bird identification assignment. “Carla, we’ve got a problem down here and we need your help,” Dove recalls him saying. Burmese pythons, an invasive species, were preying on wildlife in the park at an alarming rate.