Study to look at how bird friendly new Hastings bridge is

Article by: LIBOR JANY , Star Tribune 

Updated: May 10, 2014 - 2:32 PM

With reports that migratory birds are hitting the new Hastings bridge, a study hopes to provide insight.

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Bridges, along with other man-made structures, pose a threat to birds. Migratory birds have crashed into the Hastings bridge.

Sure, Mark Mar­tell had heard of birds crash­ing into man-made struc­tures, such as sky­scrap­ers, wire­less com­mu­ni­ca­tion towers and wind tur­bines — of­ten fa­tal­ly.

But bridg­es?

“It might just be some­thing about the height of the bridge, but I don’t know,” said Mar­tell, di­rec­tor of bird con­ser­va­tion for Audubon Minnesota, af­ter hear­ing re­ports that mi­gra­tory birds were fly­ing into the new Hwy. 61 Hastings bridge or be­com­ing en­tan­gled in the cables hold­ing up the $130 mil­lion span that con­nects the his­tor­ic river town to Washington County. But while en­vir­on­ment­al­ists and bird ex­perts have spent years study­ing how build­ings in ur­ban areas came to be such pro­lif­ic bird kill­ers, little such re­search has been done on bridg­es, Mar­tell said.

He hopes a new study, com­mis­sioned by the state Department of Transportation, will change that.

The study will be con­ducted amid con­cerns that birds fly­ing back from their win­ter­ing grounds in Central and South America may be killed or injured by fly­ing into the bridge, which cross­es the avi­an ex­press­way that is the Mis­sis­sip­pi River.

More than 300 spe­cies of birds — “mil­lions, if not bil­lions” — fly along the riv­er to and from their win­ter­ing grounds, said the park serv­ice’s Paul Labovitz, who serves as super­in­tend­ent of the Mis­sis­sip­pi River National River and Rec­re­a­tion Area.

“I watched a flight of peli­cans one sum­mer day fly­ing over that took 15 min­utes to pass over me,” Labovitz said last week. “So the num­bers are stag­ger­ing.”

Continued