As published in the respected journal, Science, in the past 50 years we have lost almost 30% of our bird populations. That’s 3 billion birds, gone! But that tragic trend can be stopped and indeed reversed. The populations of raptors and waterfowl have actually increased. The North American Wetlands Conservation Act is an example of an action taken to enhance their numbers. A leading cause of these losses are bird collisions with windows. Birds don’t recognize glass as a barrier, see the reflection of sky and trees, and thinking it as habitat fly into it at full speed and kill themselves in hundreds of millions to as much as a billion yearly. An increasing number of cities, states, small towns and other jurisdictions have enacted ordinances requiring bird friendly construction. Some have established guidelines.
Many private institutions like colleges, universities, stadiums, apartment buildings, etc, have also built bird friendly buildings. Highly significant, the General Services Administration (GSA), the largest contractor in the country and responsible for all federal buildings nationwide, recently published detailed rules requiring bird friendly criteria (check page 145). You can add your community to the growing list of places using bird friendly construction. If you haven’t already done so, get to know your local political office holders. Have coffee with them, cultivate them and impress upon them the urgency of this tragic loss of an essential part of our nation’s heritage.
For the consumer, this guide lists the various low to minimal cost ideas anyone can have installed in their own home or apartment (or do-it-yourself). Finally, for the “situations and solutions” this link is of a recent discussion featuring Dr. Daniel Klem, the nation’s acknowledged expert on collisions and bird friendly ways to remedy them.
