All airports must deal with the threat of bird strikes, but at Kennedy, which was built in wetlands, the relationship with wildlife is particularly lively and complicated. Take the aforementioned gull. Gulls love Kennedy. They scoop clams from adjacent Jamaica Bay and drop them on the tarmac, where the shells pop open to reveal the tasty treat. There are clamshells all over the runways.

Unlike those that disrupted Captain Sullenberger’s flight last Jan. 15, most bird strikes are not witnessed by pilots, but discovered by the wildlife team upon recovering the carcass. There have been fewer than 100 per year over Kennedy for most of the last decade, down from 315 in 1988 and 314 in 1989, thanks largely to the airport’s depredation  lethal shooting  program, started in 1991.

That is just one of many tools in Ms. Francoeur’s toolbox.

PYROTECHNICS They look like the fat revolvers from a Dick Tracy strip, but the pistols the wildlife supervisors carry on J.F.K.’s runways do not fire bullets. They are noisemakers that shoot two different rounds, depending on the species of bird the person wants to scare away  the “whistler,” which emits a harsh Fourth-of-July-type screech, and the “banger,” which, as the name suggests, bangs.

TRAPS The airport traps “mostly what they call ‘nuisance birds’  pigeons, starlings and house sparrows,” Ms. Francoeur said. One trap is shaped like a funnel. “They walk in and get disoriented,” she said. “They just walk around the edges. They kind of walk around the exit point, they just keep missing it.”

Image FLIGHT PATH Laura C. Francoeur, the chief wildlife biologist for the Port Authority, has a variety of tactics, some lethal, to discourage birds from lingering around airports. Credit... Photographs by Richard Perry/The New York Times

BIRDS OF PREY From May to November, falcons are deployed to scare off smaller birds. The falcons are teased with a lure that looks like a bird they preys upon, setting the falcon into a series of dives as if it were hunting. “Birds see this from a distance away, they see this falcon is in hunting mode, and theoretically, they don’t want anything to do with that part of the airport,” Ms. Francoeur said. Falcons are not supposed to actually kill birds, but they do from time to time. “It’ll go for retraining,” Ms. Francoeur said.