Expert Says Glass Is Major Threat to Birds

dlkf writes "According this AP article, 'Glass is ubiquitous and it's indiscriminate, killing the fit and the unfit... estimates (are) that collisions with glass kill up to 1 billion birds a year in the United States alone.' First wind turbines and now glass. What will they come up with next..."

Re:not much can be done about this

[bhima]

Here in Austria we have the shadows of predator birds on most glass stuff that the goverment puts up. Not on houses or buildings but on highway dividers and bus stops and things like that. I supose it helps, but I really don't know.

What of it

[gnalre]

So do domestic cats. What of it.

Call it evolution in action

Insects too

[Paradise Pete]

A dozen times a day flying insects bang (surprisingly loudly) into my office windows.
Don't know how many get killed by it, though.

But the impact patterns are BEAUTIFUL!

[dpilot]

My place of employment has glassed-in corridors between buildings, some of those corridors being multi-story. They have solved the bird problem by placing stick-on silhouettes of some sort of predatory bird, one on every other pane, or so. I haven't seen or heard of a collision, since.

But back when they were happening, the birds left a beautiful dust pattern on the windows as they hit. It captured incredible levels of detail to the feathers, etc.

hard-headed Black Woodpecker

[ballpoint]

A year ago I heard a big bang and found a dazzled rare (at least in my neck of the woods) Black Woodpecker [kerihuel.free.fr] on the ground. I managed to grab it before the cat did, held it in my hands for 5 minutes letting it come to its senses and let it fly away.

The bird probably survived because woodpeckers should be well equipped to deal with head-shocking events.

It's not often that you get to see these birds close up, not to mention hold them and quitely look at them. Quite an experience.

Neighbour's used to catch crows (ravens in .uk)

[leonbrooks]

This was twenty-odd years ago, in Paraburdoo. Cat would pretend to be dead, lying in the hot, hot sun until a crow got to the point of actually reaching out to have just a little... BLAM! rude shock. Same cat would regularly beat up and chase away quite large dogs. Never seemed to fight with ours, though.

Poem

[joebok]

From Pale Fire by V. Nabokov:

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane;
I was the smudge of ashen fluff--and I
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.
And from the inside, too, I'd duplicate
Myself, my lamp, an apple on a plate:
Uncurtaining the night, I'd let dark glass
Hang all the furniture above the grass,
And how delightful when a fall of snow
Covered my glimpse of lawn and reached up so
As to make chair and bed exactly stand
Upon that snow, out in that crystal land!


Great book!

Re:Birds and windows

[xilmaril]

a story to relate.

a few weeks ago, I was sitting on the computer (what else), when I heard a *thud* and the entire house shook. it was like an earthquake.

the cause? a local bird (I don't know what they're called. think really big, really fat pheasant) had flown into one of the exterior walls. not a window, mind, a wall. It sat there for about 10 minutes, stunned (time enough for me to take pics of it demolishing a tomato vine), then it stood up, wandered around my yard for a while, and flew off.

I know houses these days aren't built as solidly as possible, but it still must have been going at an incredible speed to do that.