From fish to fowl
Freshwater biologist became leading expert on bird-aircraft collisions
Vic Solman became one of the world’s top experts in preventing dangerous collisions between aircraft and birds, but this biologist got his start with fish.
Solman was a freshwater scientist by training, one of the original staff of what became the Canadian Wildlife Service.
But his knowledge of birds kept him busy most of his career, and he continued to provide expertise long after retirement.
He was an auto mechanic’s son in Toronto who planned to be an engineer, then switched to biology at the University of Toronto.
In the spring of 1936, he worked at the Ontario Fisheries Research Lab on Opeongo Lake in Algonquin Park. As an undergraduate, he did camp chores and assisted with the research.
Fellow student Richard B. Miller later described the makeshift camp deep in blackfly country, accessible only by mud track: “The cottage was too small for us, so we built platforms for 10-by-12 tents on the hillside behind. These were lovely places. They were high enough to get the breeze, which kept them cooler and freer of flies, and also provided a beautiful view of the lake.
“Here it was only a half-mile wide, and the opposite shore was high and heavily timbered. To sit in one’s tent doorway and, with binoculars, watch the forest creatures coming to water in the evening, was a continual source of pleasure. Deer we always saw and they became commonplace; less often there were bears and, rarely, a moose.”
The fish lab was an important launching place for scientific careers. Miller went on to become head of zoology at the University of Alberta, Kenneth Doan became Manitoba’s chief biologist and other “labbers,” as locals called them, became senior scientists with the Fisheries Research Board of Canada.
In 1942, Solman received his PhD (showing in his thesis that pike eat baby ducks), and he became a meteorological officer for the Royal Air Force Ferry Command, which flew a steady supply of new aircraft to Britain during the war.
By 1945, he was back to wildlife, serving as a federal government limnologist, or freshwater scientist.
In 1947, Canada opened its new Dominion Wildlife Service with a staff of fewer than 30 people. Vic Solman was one of the group, as recorded in A Passion for Wildlife, a history of the first 50 years of the wildlife service.
Travelling with his wife, Ruth, a botanist, he surveyed the fish and conditions in lakes in national parks all across Canada. He became the chief biologist for the service in 1948.
And suddenly — the record doesn’t give much detail here — the fish scientist was studying birds: American woodcock and Wilson’s snipe. By the early 1950s, this led him to the hazards caused by birds colliding with aircraft.
He knew about this problem firsthand. As a grad student in 1941, he was on a flight with Ducks Unlimited when their small airplane hit a duck. This punched a hole in the wing dangerously close to a fuel line, big enough for Solman to stick his arm right into it after they landed.
As flying became more common, so did bird collisions.
In 1960, 62 people were killed when a Lockheed Electra airliner sucked in a flock of starlings just after takeoff from Boston. Three of four engines failed, and the aircraft plunged into the sea.
Solman and others started experimenting with radar to plot times and places where flocks of birds posed an obstacle, and over time both Air Canada and National Defence reported fewer hits.
According to the Canadian Wildlife Service, his work saved an estimated two CF-104 Starfighters each year in the 1960s.
The Bird Strike Association of Canada says that Solman “was a member (1964-1973) and chairman (1973-1976) of the Associate Committee on Bird Hazards to Aircraft of the National Research Council of Canada, and he remained involved