The Best Place for a Bird is On My Plate.

Instead of doing my homework this morning, I was trolling Wired.com ( I know this is where 90% of my material comes from, but it's a cool site) when a headline caught my fancy. "Bird Plus Plane Equals Snarge." WTF is Snarge?!? Oh I have to read this. Common, you can't tell me you aren't slightly curious of what is this snarge they speak about. I know what Bird + Plane equals: a whole lotta soup. So I read on and find out that snarge is the technical term for "bloody goo" as lab scientist define it. Or as the head of the Smithsonian lab Carla Dove (great name for snarge expert) puts it "It's bird ick." Yea, this lady has been hanging out with good ole Bush too long for using termanology as 'ick.' Their basic job is to determine the species so they can map what areas are highest risk of certain types of birds. In other words Blah blah blah bladddy blah blah. Get back to the snarge talk already. Ahh, here we go, "Jet engines must now be able to withstand the ingestion of an 8-pound waterfowl without failing (this is tested in the lab by firing a chicken from a cannon at point-blank range)." Now that is a fun job. Go to work every day with a chicken cannon; and yes, I have seen the Mythbusters episodes where they shoot frozen and thawed chickens at panes of glass. The absolute best paragraph in the entire article, possibly even better then the invention of the word snarge, is the last paragragh, where I will now copy exactly as to not loose anything.

And its not just birds. Sometimes jet-stream encounters can take a page from the X-Files. "We've had frogs, turtles, snakes. We had a cat once that was struck at some high altitude," said the Smithsonian's Dove. She says birds like hawks and herons will occasionally drop their quarries into oncoming planes. "The other day we had a bird strike. We sent the sample to the DNA lab and it came back as rabbit. How do you explain to the FAA that we had a rabbit strike at 1,800 feet?"

Wow, this article kicks butt. I mean, snarge, flying rabbits, What more do you want?!
Oh yea, there are also some sweet pictures here at http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,68937,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_2

I like chicken.