Action Alert: Prevent Bird-Window Strikes
By Sarah Schmidt
Our much-loved picture windows have been killing birds for generations. I just read a wonderful book, Woman, Watching: Louise de Kiriline Lawrence and the Songbirds of Pimisi Bay. As early as the 1950s, Louise, referred to as a Canadian Rachel Carson, was deeply concerned about the prevalence of bird window strikes and the link with declining bird populations — so birds have been slaughtered by our windows for more than 70 years!
Have any birds hit your windows this year? Birds can’t distinguish habitat reflected in windows from real trees and sky. More than a billion birds die in window collisions in the U.S. every year, the majority of these on residential homes.
Birds that strike windows at speed may appear to recover from the initial impact and fly off. But they’ll likely die later or have major internal injuries that will impair their ability to find food or escape predation.
As Joshua Morris, conservation director for Birds Connect Seattle, wrote:
“We estimate that collisions with windows on Seattle homes kill around 300 birds every day in spring. Many more are painfully injured…. Even if we’re not finding carcasses under our windows, it’s still important to make windows safe for birds, especially if we have feeders up or are intentionally gardening for birds. Feeders and vegetation are major contributing factors to collision risk. Collisions are a major source of human-related bird mortality.”
Resources for preventing bird window strikes from Birds Connect Seattle
“Prevent Bird-Window Collisions” details specific strategies for reducing bird-window collisions
A one-minute animated video about preventing window collisions
“In Service of Birds,” an article and poem by Americorp member and urban conservation educator Ser Anderson
My family’s successful strategy
Do you want to stop killing birds with your windows? Here’s what we did:
Identified which windows birds were hitting.
From a roll of plastic garden fencing with 2 x 2” squares, we cut sections to reach the outer edges of the exterior window frame.
Spread the sections tightly in front of the windows using cup screw hooks in the wood frame.
This has virtually eliminated bird strikes. Recently we’ve lost two birds to collisions with small glass windows in exterior doors. A quick solution is to draw patterns on the outside of these windows with a bar of soap, with spaces no more than two inches apart.
Share your suggestions!
Let’s help each other find solutions. I invite Shorelines readers to write to me describing what methods have worked for you: 4bats@ixoreus.com. I’ll share some of them in future newsletters.