Landfill Sentry Matches Wits With Birds to Protect Aircraft and Lives

When the stench of garbage begins to rise over the 420-acre Miramar Sanitary Landfill, Mike Rennie loads his shotgun with an Explosive Pest Repellent Device, looks into the sun and waits.

The birds will be here soon, the 19-year-old city laborer says. “They always come back.” And Rennie is ready for them.

Armed with loud but harmless flying projectiles, Rennie is one of a dozen city employees trained in the art of scaring scavengers--the gulls and blackbirds that look upon the landfill as their next meal. Seven days a week, 12 hours a day, one of these men can be found atop a mountain of trash, squinting for a glimpse of a gull. Every few minutes, a Navy jet flies overhead--each one a $33.5-million reminder of why Rennie and his colleagues do what they do.

“If the sea gulls get sucked up in there,” he explained Thursday as an F-14 jet fighter from the neighboring Miramar Naval Air Station roared by, “then I get in trouble.”

On average, laborers like Rennie make $28,000 a year, including benefits, according to Michael Bresnahan, the landfill operations manager. But he says funding the city’s bird-control program is a small price to pay for the use of the landfill site, which is owned by the Navy.

The Navy has granted the city an easement to pile trash, free of charge, as high as the jet station’s runways. In return, the Navy dumps its trash in the landfill free. There’s only one catch--the city must prevent “bird strikes.”

“Birds and aviation are a difficult mixture,” said Chief Petty Officer Bobbie Carleton, a Navy spokeswoman, noting that, although no bird-related accidents have occurred in San Diego, jets have been known to crash elsewhere after sucking birds into their engines.

“The worst case is jet-threatening and life-threatening as well,” Carleton said. “It’s also possible for what we call a ‘bird strike’ to go through the canopies (the glass over the cockpit), disabling the pilot.”

The Navy is concerned enough about such airborne obstacles that it has come up with an acronym for them: BASH, or Bird Aircraft Strike Hazards. According to Carleton, the Navy uses its BASH program to teach aviators life-saving strategies.

“Like when you’re flying around, and you meet a duck, you fly up because the duck will fly down--duck psychology,” Carleton said. “I wouldn’t say that it’s a real exact science. If it was, we wouldn’t need these guys out there seven days a week.”

But, in fact, says Hank L. Rodriguez, the senior disposal site supervisor at the landfill, a little bird psychology goes a long way.

His efforts to repel birds have included purchasing plastic owls and playing amplified recordings of birds in distress. Once, he ran a crisscross of wires across the mouth of a landfill pit to disrupt birds’ flight patterns. But the cornerstone of his bird control program is an arsenal of noise-making cartridges, three types of “racket bombs” that his men fire at the rate of up to 300 a day.

With 4,400 tons of fresh, pungent trash arriving at the landfill each day, the birds have plenty of incentive to persevere. So city workers are strategic in their firecracker deployment. After observing that birds soon learn to recognize which vehicle carries the man with the shotgun, Rodriguez has advised his bird control men to switch cars every so often. And he advises his men not to fire at regular intervals--”you have to be sporadic.”

“Everything works to a certain extent, but nothing works 100%,” he said. “You’ve got to combine things to keep them disoriented.”

After a year on the job, Rennie has discovered that, if he fires too many “whistlers” in a row, the birds get used to it. The trick is to keep them guessing: a whistler, followed by the boom of a racket bomb, followed by the dreaded combo--a whistler that wiggles with a disconcertingly erratic motion.

He has also learned to watch for “scouts”--the lone birds that blaze the trail for the entire flock. If you let one land, the rest will follow, a moving wall of feathers.

“One of them will casually come over, and I’ll fire,” Rennie said. “When they finally realize I’m not going to let them land, they head elsewhere.”

But, with one man covering more than 400 acres, the birds have the advantage. They circle back, luring the human and his truck to another site, only to return to their original target.

“In due time they figure me out,” Rennie concedes. “Makes you wonder what’s going on in that little head of theirs.”

“You have to chase them at times. They’ll play games,” Rodriguez said. “You have to keep alternating your methods.”

“You’ve got to outthink them,” said landfill manager Bresnahan. “The humbling part is when they outthink you.”

Rennie, who also does other tasks at the dump, says that when he first realized what part of the tasks entailed, he was surprised.

“They said, ‘We’re going to hire you to shoot a shotgun.’ I said, ‘Right on! Sounds great,’ ” he said, adding that his friends “don’t believe it.”

Still, he said, “It’s not a break. It’s a job. You’ve got to do it. You can’t just take a nap in the truck.”