Italy’s iconic “Floating City” is famous for many things, including its historic network of canals, stunning architectural landscape, and rich artistic and cultural heritage. But one abiding feature that isn’t always advertised are her avian residents and abundance of seagulls in particular.
These bold assailants are notorious for opportunistically snatching food from café tables, swooping down swiftly from terraces or out of thin air, sometimes shattering dishware in the process, and remorselessly stealing eats right out of people’s hands as they stroll the streets of Venice.
Last week, these winged hooligans cause chaos in another capacity by congregating en masse on the runway at Venice Marco Polo Airport. Located adjacent to the lagoon, just north of the storied city, it’s Italy’s fifth-busiest airport and the largest in the country’s northern region outside the Milan area.
On Friday morning, a large flock of the feathered nuisances gathered at the end of the airport runway, grinding operations to a halt. All flights were grounded between 9.54 a.m. and 10.45 a.m., an airport spokesperson told CNN. And, 20 inbound flights had to be diverted to other airports in northern Italy, named Treviso, Verona, Trieste and Milan.
A shuttle trip from Treviso to Venice takes only 30 minutes, but passengers whose planes were diverted Verona were faced with a drive of over an hour, while those sent to Trieste or Milan had to travel at least two or three hours by road to reach their final destination.
While incoming flights were being rerouted to airports without throngs of seagulls, staff from the airport’s management company, SAVE, were enacting their standard anti-gull protocols. Venice airport keeps a falcon on hand, whose job it is to disperse such battalions of seabirds when they threaten the safety of flight operations.
In this instance, a falconer released the raptor to scare off the mob of around 200 birds, and “fauna-friendly acoustic deterrents” were also used to encourage the swarm of seagulls to scatter, according to a statement by the airport. Once the falcon had done its job and the flock had moved on, normal airport operations resumed at 11.20 a.m.
Venice’s airport isn’t the only one with a resident falconer. Treviso, roughly 14 miles inland from the coast, also retains one. Flocks of birds hanging around airports can be extremely hazardous to flight operations. “Bird strikes”—when a flock of birds collides with a plane and is drawn into the engines—are a massive safety concern, as they can cause engine failure and plane crashes.
Perhaps the best-known bird strike was the 2009 “miracle on the Hudson” incident, when a US Airways flight out of New York’s LaGuardia, piloted by Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, hit a flock of Canada geese and was forced to make an emergency water landing on the Hudson River.
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