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.
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