Window Coverings Mimic Tree Branches to Deter Birds

The University of Florida is experimenting with a unique window design that mimics tree branches to help prevent bird collisions.

April 26, 2018, at 1:50 a.m.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. (AP) — The University of Florida is experimenting with a unique window design that mimics tree branches to help prevent bird collisions.

School officials say birds hitting windows has been a campus-wide problem for years. Mark Hostetler is a professor of wildlife ecology and conservation in UF's Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences. He says they asked students to monitor buildings two years ago to see where the bulk of the collisions were occurring.

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Wildlife-friendly gardens may be more deadly to birds, report shows

New research shows that more birds die from collisions with windows in gardens that provide better bird habitat, reports Conservation

Sarah DeWeerdt for Conservation, part of the Guardian Environment Network

Wednesday 3 August 2016 11.30 BST

Collisions with windows are a serious source of mortality for birds: hundreds of millions die from window strikes each year in the US alone. Most attention to this problem has focused on high-rise buildings, because each individual building of this type can kill a great many birds.

But because there are so many residential dwellings, even a few collisions per home means that collectively these structures are responsible for a huge number of bird deaths. Yet researchers don’t know why one house has more collisions than another, let alone how to prevent them.

A new study suggests that yards that provide better overall bird habitat also lead to increased risk of window strikes – a result that brings home (quite literally) how our efforts to share our habitat with wildlife sometimes have unintended consequences.

In the study, researchers recruited residents of Alberta, Canada to participate in a citizen-science effort dubbed the Birds and Windows Project. Participants walked the perimeter of their home or apartment building daily and looked for evidence of bird-window collisions such as dead or injured birds, feathers, or blood on windows.

The researchers also collected information about the characteristics of each home and yard, such as whether it was in an urban or rural area, the surrounding vegetation, square footage, number of windows, and the number and location of bird feeders in the yard.

Several past studies have looked at factors that increase the risk of bird strikes, but this is the first to consider four spatial scales simultaneously: neighborhood, yard, house, and window.

Read on … 

Making window glass visible – but only to birds

Ultraviolet patterns can make window glass visible to birds, thus preventing fatal collisions. However, it has now been shown that such windows are not likely to work for all species, but only for birds like small passerines, gulls and parrots, who have a special type of colour vision. For birds of prey, geese, pigeons and crows, these patterns should be difficult to detect. These conclusions appear today in an article by Olle Håstad and Anders Ödeen in PeerJ.

Billions of birds are killed in window collisions every year. This is one of the most important human sources of avian mortality. A popular and effective remedy is to apply stickers showing the silhouettes of birds of prey to windows. Birds avoid colliding with these stickers but one problem remains: that the birds collide with the glass in between the stickers instead. To avoid having to cover whole windows with stickers, glass must be made visible to birds in some other, and less obtrusive, way.

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The invisible killer threatening millions of migrating birds

By Aidan LewisBBC News, Washington

Every year, hundreds of millions of birds are killed or injured when they fly into windows. Volunteers who document the collisions are now calling for architects and landlords to make their buildings more bird friendly to reduce the number of deaths.

Sometimes birds see plants or empty spaces beyond the windows - sometimes they just see the reflection of the sky or trees, but not the glass itself.

Most tend to cruise at 20-30mph (32-48kph) - if they hit a window at that speed the impact is usually fatal as their beak is jammed back into the brain.

Although collisions can happen anywhere, they are most common in cities where big glass buildings proliferate.

Local birds seem to learn where they can fly safely but migratory songbirds such as warblers, thrushes and sparrows have a particular problem identifying glass.

They usually fly by night when they are less visible to predators and use the stars to navigate - but they appear to get confused by the illumination of towns and cities below.

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Stop blaming cats: As many as 988 million birds die annually in window collisions.

By Susan Milius and Science News, Published: February 3

Hundreds of millions of birds die each year from crashing into windows

Between 365 and 988 million birds die from crashing into windows in the United States each year, according to a new report. That may be as much as 10 percent of the estimated total bird population of the country.

The estimate puts windows behind only cats as the largest source of human-related menaces that kill birds directly.

The biggest share of the collision deaths comes not from glass massacres at skyscrapers but from occasional collisions with the nation’s many small buildings, saysScott Loss of Oklahoma State University in Stillwater. “It’s death by a million nicks.”

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Canadian homes a kill zone for up to 22 million birds a year

(Edmonton) The thud of a bird hitting a window is something many Canadian home owners experience. Up until now, little research has been done to document the significant these collisions for Canada's bird populations. A University of Alberta biology class project supervised by researcher Erin Bayne suggests that many birds meet their end in run-ins with Canadian homes.

The U of A students estimate a staggering 22 million birds a year die from colliding with windows of homes across the country. The research was done in Edmonton and surrounding area using evidence gathered from more than 1,700 homeowners. Homeowners were recruited to become citizen scientists for the study. The citizen scientists were required to complete an online survey where they were asked to recall fatal bird hits over the previous year. Bayne and his team processed the Edmonton data and concluded that with approximately 300,000 homes in the study area the death toll for birds from window strikes might reach 180,000 per year.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2012-09-canadian-homes-zone-million-birds.html#jCp