As regular CFZ-watchers will know, for some time Corinna has been doing a column for Animals & Men and a regular segment on On The Track... particularly about out-of-place birds and rare vagrants. There seem to be more and more bird stories from all over the world hitting the news these days so, to make room for them all - and to give them all equal and worthy coverage - she has set up this new blog to cover all things feathery and Fortean.

Sunday, 16 March 2014

Plain Talk: Let's do a little to save a lot of birds


Editor Emeritus Dave Zweifel has been with The Capital Times since he graduated from UW-Madison in 1962, serving as the paper's editor in chief from 1983 to 2008. He was president of the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council for 15 years, served as a Pulitzer Prize judge in 2000 and 2001, and named to the Wisconsin Newspaper Hall of Fame in 2011. A native of New Glarus, Wis., where he grew up on a farm, he serves on several non-profit boards and is a military veteran, having served on active duty as a field artillery officer in the early 1960s and for 26 years in the Wisconsin Army National Guard where he retired as a colonel in 1993.

Ever so often in the summertime I'll hear a sickening thump at my second-story office window that signals once again the sad news that a bird mistook it for an opening.

Sometimes the bird falls to the ground below, stunned a bit, but survives, but more often they hit the window with such force that it's doomsday.

This isn't uncommon, I've learned. A recent study conducted by fellows at the Smithsonian Institution and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has concluded that between 365 million and 988 million birds are likely killed in the United States each year as a result of collisions with buildings.


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