Snarge

Arriving mostly in sealed plastic bags, these included birds’ feet, whole feathers or tiny bits of down, and pulverized bird guts, known as snarge.

Snarge can be a wad of a Canada goose lodged inside an airplane engine. Or it can be a broken and burned gull feather littered along the runway. Snarge can even be as small as a rusty-red smear on the nose of an airliner. But no matter what form it takes, every bit of snarge is different — and all snarge is important.