WASHINGTON -- In a massive room filled floor-to-ceiling with some 650,000 preserved bird carcasses, Marcy Heacker-Skeans and two other researchers spend their days matching feathers in hopes of preventing one of the deadliest threats to U.S. Air Force aircraft - - birds.

Even a small bird in the engine can be deadly, and Air Force lore includes tales of birdaircraft collisions that ended in tragedy. One of the most tragic: In September 1995, 24 U.S. and Canadian airmen died after an Air Force AWACS over Elmendorf Air Force Base in Alaska collided with a flock of Canada geese. Heacker-Skeans, a 1982 Northmont High School graduate, started working as a volunteer at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History's Feather Identification Lab in 1996, then was hired fulltime in 2000. In something of a ornithological version of the crime show "CSI," she matches the feathers and bird detritus scraped off of military and civilian aircraft to feathers from the Smithsonian's massive collection.