It’s always sad to see the fatal result of a bird striking a window.
Estimates are that a billion birds die in North America each year in this unnecessary and preventable way.
A university student has decided she would like to help make a change to prevent those bird fatalities.
UNBC student Jeannine Randall, with a masters of science in natural resources and environmental studies and now working towards her PhD, is studying the effects of climate change and local variability in conditions on tree swallows, which are birds that eat flying insects, making them aerial insectivores.
“If you think about going outside on a cold day there are no insects and then when you go out on a warm day there are tons of insects,” Randall explained. “If it’s really windy there are much less, so their food availability fluctuates a lot with the weather, much more than, say, birds that eat seeds.”
Randall said her passion project is to prevent birds striking windows and she started on it a couple of years ago with UNBC’s Kathy Lewis, forest pathologist/microbial ecologist, and Russ Dawson, Randall’s advisor.
“When you see a lot of glass in a building, it’s not visible to birds,” Randall said. "They don’t perceive it as a solid surface, especially if it reflects trees or if they can see through it and it looks like a travel corridor. So essentially what we wanted to do is put up deterrents - so things on the surface of the windows - to make them visible to the birds.”
The project takes place at the university as it’s such a big campus and there is a lot of glass within the buildings.
“We wanted to learn what the worst areas were and then treat an area to demonstrate its effectiveness,” Randall said. “The main goal is to save the birds.”
And the study would provide more evidence of what works, she added.
“It’s quite a big problem,” Randall said about bird strikes. “It’s considered the number two anthropogenic threat to birds.”
A change made by people is the definition of the word anthropogenic.
Cats are the number one anthropogenic cause of bird deaths.
There’s at least 200 birds a year that are killed when they hit a window on the UNBC campus, she added.
“And that’s a lot, right?” Randall said.
To gain some perspective Randall said she had done some research and discovered there’s at least 30,000 households in Prince George and an educated guess sees about 5,000 other buildings in the city. That’s about 35,000 buildings that could potentially kill at least one bird a year, some don’t and others kill more so when that is put into perspective that could mean 35,000 birds are killed in Prince George every year.
“And that’s a big problem,’ Randall said. “What I find interesting about this is it’s a problem with a relatively straight forward solution.”
A company called Feather Friendly offers bird collision deterrent technologies that makes glass visible to birds, which sees dots spaced about two inches apart on a clingy film applied to the outside of the glass. For smaller applications like household windows there’s DIY tape offered as well.
In a world where environmental problems could take generations to fix, putting polka dots on your windows to save birds is one thing that brings immediate change.
According to the Feather Friendly website it’s 95 per cent effective but Randall said on the section of the university’s windows they’ve applied it to there has been a 100 per cent reduction of birds hitting the window.
There have been no dead birds on the ground, or feathers stuck on the windows to indicate a collision, in the year since the installation was done, she added.
“For me this is relatively simple – it’s just a retrofit,” Randall said. “I find it inspiring. You have to advocate for it and people have to care enough to save the birds.”
At UNBC Randall said she’s got another spot in mind for the next installation to prevent bird strikes.
“It’s this building, (the Teaching and Learning Centre, Building 10) that’s on my hit list, or maybe my no-hit list,” Randall smiled.
Randall also said the glassed-in corridor in front of the science building that saw the first preventative measure installed had a hawk silhouette on it and before the installation she ironically found a dead bird right under it so that was not effective at all.
“When you put things on the window, they have to be close together because birds are adapted to finding gaps in between bushes and so they will fly in between the two,” Randall said.
And here is the bad news.
You know when the bird hits the window and you go to find it sitting there stunned on the ground or you see it fly away?
“A lot of the birds do not recover,” Randall said, knowing she was the bearer of bad news.
“The estimate is 60 per cent of them don’t make it. They usually have internal injuries or concussions and fly off to die in the bush or they get eaten by a scavenger.”
Randall said that’s why people underestimate the impact windows have on bird populations.
“It would be great to get something going on a bigger scale in Prince George and starting here at the university is leading by example,” Randall said.
“The glass corridor accounted for about 24 per cent of strikes on campus and that went to zero and it’s been up for a year.”
Randall and a group of about 14 volunteers monitor for bird strikes three times a year for three weeks. Each session sees a team of two people walk around the main part of campus in about an hour, a half hour after sunrise to try to beat the scavengers to the bird bodies. The team reports the dead birds and bunches of bird feathers because that indicates where a bird was eaten, and feathers stuck on windows are considered inconclusive but you know it hit the window.
There is also a community reporting program in place at the university where people who see a strike or the evidence of a strike can report it to Randall via email.
“That raises awareness, engages people and helps us increase our surveillance efforts,” Randall said.
“It’s been really inspiring to see a problem and then with the cooperation of the university and volunteers you actually manage to do something about it.”
