Researcher using bird's eye view to reduce building strikes

September 20, 2018 by Paul Mayne, University of Western Ontario

Brandon Samuels plans to set up cameras this January in hopes of catching footage of birds crashing into windows across campus. Honestly, he really is a nice guy – it's for science.

The Neuroscience Ph.D. student is working on ways to help mitigate the number of birds colliding with large glass structures on campus – and beyond – by better understanding the visual perspective of the birds prior to impact.

"We don't know what a bird is looking at when it's flying," said Samuels, who recently completed his masters at Western. "There is a statistical way of looking at how many birds collide – where and when. But I'm interested from the perspective of morphology. I want to look at it from the bird's eyes – how they see, how their vision contributes to being able to see or not see an obstacle.

"Bird vision is very different from species to species. You have owls with huge eyes on the front their head and you have little birds with eyes on the sides of their head. You would imagine they see the world quite differently."

There are a number of reasons that may cause a bird to fly into a window. They could be trying to pass through an area as if it was not there. Maybe they cannot distinguish the actual natural landscape from what is reflected on building surfaces. Maybe they cannot navigate in open spaces when taller structures reflect the blue of the sky.

"Unlike a downtown core, Western's campus has a lot of green space, which is lovely. We enjoy it; the birds enjoy it. But when you have glass like this, mixed in with trees and green cover, that's where the risk really lies."

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Migration forecasts could help prevent wind turbines and buildings from killing millions of birds

By Erik Stokstad Apr. 5, 2018 , 4:15 PM

Each spring, billions of birds fly vast distances to spend the summer in North America, most of them traveling at night. It's a trip fraught with peril: Many slam into wind turbines or brightly lit buildings. Now, a new forecasting system for bird migration could help put an end to millions of those deaths by warning wind farm operators and building managers of incoming migrations 3 days in advance.

Although hawks and other large species migrate during the day, most small birds migrate at night to avoid predators and enjoy better flying conditions. The daily legs of these migrations depend heavily on the weather. If conditions are too cold or rainy, migrants hang out in trees until the skies clear. And birds are more likely to continue their journeys when warm air signals an incoming, southerly tailwind. Since 2012, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology has made predictions about these migrations by using observer sightings and regional weather reports on its BirdCast website.

To scale up and automate these forecasts Benjamin Van Doren, a Ph.D. student at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, and Kyle Horton, a postdoc at the Cornell lab, built a computer model of weather and bird migration. They began with weather radar, the only effective way to monitor night-time migrations. Individual birds can't be detected, but radar can reveal the density of birds in the airspace: 60 to 70 birds per cubic kilometer in a light migration, and as many as 1700 in a heavy one.

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Life aloft: The unexplored ecosystem above your head

7 June 2017

We have nature reserves on land and at sea, but the sky has never been considered a habitat, let alone one worth preserving, until now

By Lesley Evans Ogden

THE Federal Bureau of Investigation has a spectacular view of the city skyline from its Chicago office tower. But when special agent Julia Meredith arrived at work one Monday morning, her eyes were focused firmly on the ground. That’s where the bodies were – more than 10 of them.

Some of the dead were Blackburnian warblers, birds with bright yellow and orange plumage that are rarely seen in the city. They had been on their way to their wintering grounds in South America when they had collided with the building’s glass facade. “They had come all this way and here they were, dead,” says Meredith.

It’s not an isolated incident. Just last month, 395 migrating birds were killed in one building strike in Galveston, Texas. The world over, wherever humans are extending their buildings, machines and light into the sky, the lives of aerial creatures are at increasing risk. We don’t have very accurate figures, but in the US, casualties are thought to run into the hundreds of millions every year. Yet while efforts to protect areas on land and in water have accelerated since the 1970s, the sky has been almost entirely ignored.

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Building owners not responsible for deaths of birds that fly into it, judge rules

Environmental groups and animal rights advocates have lost a landmark lawsuit in the years-long fight to curb fatal bird collisions.

The provincial court ruling Wednesday comes more than two years after Ontario Nature and Ecojustice, an environmental law firm, launched an unprecedented action against Menkes Developments, claiming more than 800 birds were killed or crippled after crashing into its Consilium Place property between 2008 and 2009.

The judgment, issued by Justice of the Peace William Turtle, dismissed three charges against Menkes leveled under the federal Environmental Protection Act and the Ontario Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act. Consilium Place, a cluster of highrise towers near Highway 401 and McCowan Rd., was long considered Toronto’s deadliest building complex for bird strikes.

The prosecution had argued that sunlight reflected from Consilium’s mirrored glass windows was considered radiation and, therefore, a contaminant under the Environmental Protection Act.

Reflected light, they argued, deceives birds into believing the building’s windows are continuous sky. While most crashes are fatal, court heard many birds were left crippled, with broken necks, broken beaks, brain trauma or spinal fractures.

According to the non-profit Fatal Light Awareness Program, which has tracked bird collisions in the GTA since 2003, more than 7,000 birds slammed into Consilium’s windows between 2000 and 2010. FLAP has estimated at least one million birds die in Toronto-area building collisions each year as they fly northward on popular migratory paths over Lake Ontario.

Read on:  http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/article/1287601--building-owners-not-responsible-for-deaths-of-birds-that-fly-into-it-judge-rules

Decisions Imminent in Landmark Trials Over Toronto's Worst Bird Killing Buildings

MEDIA RELEASE 

(Washington, D.C., November 9, 2012) Many of the 48 million Americans who enjoy bird watching will have a strong interest in the pending verdicts in two unprecedented lawsuits in Toronto, Canada. One of the deadliest threats to birds worldwide – building collisions – has, in a sense, been put on trial.

A verdict in the first trial, which began in April, 2011, is expected from Justice of the Peace William Turtle on November 14.  It pits the owners of three adjoining glass office buildings – Consilium Place Towers – against two environmental groups – Ecojustice andOntario Nature.

Those groups claim that the buildings, whose exterior faces are almost entirely glass, are responsible the deaths of about 7,000 birds in the last decade, making them likely the most deadly in the entire Greater Toronto area.

Menkes Consilium Inc., Menkes Developments Ltd., and Menkes Property Management Services Ltd., along with three other companies, have been charged under Canada’s Environmental Protection Act with discharging a contaminant – light reflected from the glass – that causes harm to animals. In addition to possible fines under that law, the companies also face a maximum fine of $60,000 under the Ontario Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act for causing birds to be in distress. The lawsuit followed lengthy, failed attempts to negotiate a settlement between the parties.

The verdict in the second trial, which began in April  2012, is expected from Judge Melvyn Green on December 4, 2012. Cadillac Fairview Corporation, the owner of three office buildings in the city, has been charged with violating Canada’s Species at Risk Act. The charges are being brought in a private prosecution by Ecojustice.

Read more:  http://www.abcbirds.org/newsandreports/releases/121109.html