Birdstrike Canada

Membership:

Established in 2009, Birdstrike Canada is a growing professional organization. We believe that the benefits of membership in Birdstrike Canada, providing up-to-date information and key services to members, are invaluable to the aviation industry in Canada. The access to dedicated professionals is a unique opportunity for all the stakeholders of this industry to benefit from the greatest source of wildlife strike prevention expertise in the country. As a volunteer association, we do not have staff or resources devoted to reaching potential members across Canada. However, we are slowly growing our membership, thereby enhancing the representativeness and credibility of Birdstrike Canada

  • Have  all 25 NAS airports as members
  • Have Canada’s 2 largest airlines as members
  • Continue to grow membership among Canada’s regional airports and professionals in the bird strike field

Meetings

Birdstrike Canada was organized to fill the void left by the sudden death of Bruce MacKinnon who essentially was Bird Strike Committee Canada. We began with the need to host the North American Bird Strike Conference in 2009 in Victoria and held our organizational meeting at this conference. Subsequently we have co-sponsored with Bird Strike Committee – USA North American Bird Strike Conferences in Utah (2010), Niagara Falls (2011) Milwaukee (2013), Montreal (2015), Dallas (2017) and Halifax (2019. Since recommending that the North American Bird Strike Conference becomes a biannual event, we have designed and hosted workshop held in Sidney, B.C. (2012), Ingersoll, Ontario (2014), Edmonton, Alberta (2016) and Vaudreuil, Quebec (2018). The 2020 and 2021 conferences were cancelled due to Covid. The 2022 conference is planned for Ottawa, Ontario.

Bird Strike Identification Services

With the withdrawal of the Smithsonian Institute’s bird strike ID services for Canada, Birdstrike Canada filled the void by identifying economical Canadian services that could provide similar identification services for feathers and tissue. We have also negotiated a discount for BSAC corporate members. We need to continue to promote these services and the need for species identification for all bird strikes in Canada. To that end we have successfully encouraged Transport Canada to pay for wildlife strike species identification using DNA from Canadian airports.

Other Member Services

As a professional association, Birdstrike Canada endeavours to provide information to its membership. This is primarily accomplished through the BSAC (Bird Strike Association of Canada aka Birdstrike Canada) website. We are continually growing, updating and enhancing the website and its content to keep our membership current on all issues related to bird strikes in Canada and to some extent – worldwide.

  • Develop an all new website with built in features that will allow easier maintenance and better access to members (This has been done and you are now looking at it).
  • Electronic Library: There are now over 3000 papers in our library. We have migrated our library once again – now to Zotero – which provides a vastly improved library environment.
  • Our news of wildlife strike events and information is kept up-to-date on a regular basis.
  • We have added a series of seminars to replace our cancelled conferences and plan to keep them as a regular service.
  • We have added a section to the website called useful information for airport wildlife managers which will be added to as warranted