I learned recently that as part of the ongoing Deepwater Horizon natural resource damage assessment, people are traipsing across the Gulf coast putting dead birds on beaches and letting them rot! In science speak, this is called a "bird carcass persistence" study. Government agencies stockpile frozen bird carcasses around the country for exactly this purpose: when the need arises, they ship the birds to the study site, and people place them on beaches, marshes, wherever, checking back regularly to see how long it takes the birds to decompose or disappear (i.e., be eaten). The results are used to adjust surveys of oil spill damage to account for the number of dead birds that weren't still around by the time the surveyors got there.
How gross! This is one work assignment I do not want.
(Interestingly, I remember that Mary Roach's book Stiff describes a similar study of human decomposition, but presumably the results of that one aren't used as often for survey adjustments.)
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