Astronaut tests hearts of geese, who steal hers

Before Jessica Meir became a NASA astronaut who will blast into space from Russia this month, she made a career of studying animals that live at extremes. She followed elephant seals and emperor penguins as they swam through frigid waters. She raised a dozen bar-headed geese, capable of flying three miles high, from the moment they hatched out of their eggs. They treated her as their mother.

Few creatures dare to fly over the tallest mountains on Earth. Bar-headed geese are an exception. Above the Himalayas, where the atmosphere is so thin that helicopters struggle to fly and human exertion is nearly impossible, the birds beat their wings as they migrate from India to Mongolia.

Meir led the geese into a wind tunnel designed to test submarines and sports equipment. When scientists lowered the oxygen the geese breathed, the animals chilled their blood and slowed their metabolism, Meir and her colleagues reported in a study published recently in the journal eLife.

To get birds to fly in a wind tunnel, the study authors took advantage of the avian behavior known as imprinting. Zoologist Konrad Lorenz, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1973, discovered that freshly hatched birds will bond with the first large shape they see.

Meir met her goslings in summer 2010, as they cracked out of their eggs at the Sylvan Heights Bird Park in Scotland Neck, North Carolina.

The scientist was the first thing the animals saw. “It was one of the most amazing things I’ve ever experienced in my life,” Meir said.

Meir spent almost all of her waking hours with the goslings at the bird park. They chirped and cried at the sound of her voice as she approached their pens each morning. She took baby birds for walks. When she sat on a blanket to read, they smothered her in a fluffy, gray goose-pile.

She also taught them to fly. She began by biking away from the geese on a secluded farm. Eager to stay with her, they started to run. “And then they realize that they can keep up better if they fly,” she said. After two days, the birds flew faster than she could bike, so Meir switched to a motor scooter and led them along a quiet street on the university campus.

MILSOM LAB/UBC The gaggle of 12 goslings imprinted on NASA astronaut Jessica Meir, who raised them from birth and taught them how to fly.