We are now solidly into the period of virtual meetings and becoming used to the frequent phrases: ‘You’re on mute.’ ‘We can’t hear you.’ ‘You are upside down.’ ‘Can you please mute your microphones if you’re not speaking?’. Although I joke about these common online rituals, these meetings do present opportunities to catch up with our teams and our clients in safe settings during these challenging times. I’m happy these technologies exist because they allow us to catch up with people who continue to strive to improve wildlife management activities at airports worldwide. Their passion reinforces the great work that our organization does to improve safety and conservation.
We presented at the excellent World Birdstrike Association Virtual Conference in January where the chat session on the side of presentations was practically on fire due to participation. We’ve had two sets of virtual quarterly meetings with our Vancouver-based team and weekly catchups with the Seattle-based team.
Most recently, we’ve joined professionals around the world to hash out challenging wildlife strike issues such as standardized risk assessments and training guidelines. What stands out to me from all these virtual meetings is of course how wonderful it will be when we can all meet up in person again, but also just how passionate people are about safety and conservation.
We’ve provided a couple of examples from our North American operations on implementing solutions to address wildlife attraction to airside and terminal locations.
We hope you enjoy these examples of addressing the attraction side of wildlife management, even if it is in a virtual format, and look forward to the next opportunity to catch up in person. Hope you are all safe and well.
Jeff