If you've ever heard the heartbreaking smack of a bird flying straight into a window, you're probably desperate to make sure it never happens again. Windows are wonderful inventions that allow us to observe the beauty of birds, so let's make sure they don't do more harm than good...
The worst part about researching how to improve a situation is learning how dire the situation is: In the U.S., at least 100million birds die each year due to collisions with buildings. One hundred million. What can we do about it?
- Margaret Roach of A Way To Garden has gathered some excellent tips and resources, from bird feeder placement to the newest window coverings. The tip that's most practical for renters is also the easiest: don't wash your windows. All this time I've bad-mouthed my landlord for not washing my windows (the ones that are impossible for me to reach), but perhaps he's just been acting in the birds' best interest!
- Bird Watcher's Digest has compiled the Top Ten Things You Can Do To Prevent Window Strikes, though most of them will make your home looks like a crazy person lives there. As reluctant as I would be to hang Mylar balloons, pie pans, or CDs outside of all my windows, it's really a small price to pay for birds' lives. Perhaps some lovely shiny mobiles or garland would do the trick?
- EarthEasy collected 9 Ways To Help Birds Avoid Window Collisions, the most interesting being "Block 'through-house' line of sight to the outdoors". If you can see in one window and out another window, a bird will see it as a flight path.
- Lights Out New York is an excellent organization that raises window-strike awareness and encourages people and companies to turn out their building's lights after dark. Did you know 90,000 birds die due to collisions with buildings, each year, just in New York City? Lights out, New York, and all of us!
Image: Shutterstock
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Golly, throwing up pie pans around your windows is going a bit overboard.
My parents have a few very large windows in their house. After the first time a bird crashed in the window, they came up with two different solutions, both of which worked - for a few years they did use a small paper cut out of a hawk shadow tacked to the corner.
Later when they finally took that down, they just put up a few small round stickers about the size or a quarter. They were the metal sticker kind that has a shiny back. No bird casualties.
Kaete: That's what we do in Switzerland as well! You get decals of hawk/ bird profiles at the supermarket and you stick a few on your glass windows & doors. Even the government puts them up on the clear glass walls around bus stops, etc :-)
Soaping windows is common in Chicago (start washing the tops of the windows, basically, and then don't rinse the soap off) -- famous buildings such as Crown Hall designed by Mies van der Rohe is soaped in the spring and summer months, or bird-shaped decals are put up to help birds recognize that there's glass there.
I always hate seeing poor dead birds on the sidewalk. :-(
Best thing I've tried: Place the birdfeeders close enough to the house so that they don't have the distance required to increase their velocity. This way if they do hit the window, it will less likely be a fatal collision. Plus, having the feeders closer is way more entertaining, is it not?
Kinda along the lines of what Cactina said, I have simple printout of an owl silhouette hanging in my bedroom window. I put it up because really noisy birds (and lots of them) kept nesting in my next door neighbors window wells and driving me crazy. Anyways, it stopped them from nesting there and I imagine it also would prevent them from crashing into my window...
The suggestions in Bird Watcher's Digest are pretty funny. What's with the mylar-wrapped toilet paper tubes? That's so weird! Wouldn't a metal wind chime do the same thing, without looking completely ugly and crazy?
"...an aluminum pie pan, tin foil, Christmas decorations, or old compact discs (CDs). Or it can be something that flutters in the wind, such as strips from a plastic garbage bag."
Oh, dear, too funny!
Thank you for this. Window strikes are a serious threat to birds along with habitat loss. Far more than cats. Also thank you for NOT mentioning those silly crow stickers, which do not work.
I hear new types of windows are being designed as bird proof. They are stylish and do not obstruct view. I will try to find the link.
"An alternative is to get some old window screens (old storm window screens or screen doors work well) and suspend them in front of the windows birds are hitting regularly."
hahahahaha Grey Gardenssss
Last year I would hear THUMP every so often on my slider, but not lately. I do have a feeder on my deck so I wouldn't want to put up any fake birds of prey to scare off the birds. We ended up just sliding the screen to the middle of the slider so the amount of reflective surface is reduced to two small sections instead of one giant one. It seems to have worked.
My family had a bird repeatedly fly into our sliding glass door every morning as the sun came up. Solution? I got up before the bird one morning, hid in the bushes, waited for it to hit the door . . . then I shot it with a blow gun! Bye bird! No more snot window!
The art dept at my college had this issue in their studio. They put up very cool looking decals in the shape of a flying bird and it worked. I don't think the birds are actually supposed to think it's a predator, I think it's just something to disrupt the reflection and define that as a separate plane...not sure. Anyway, way more design-friendly than hanging pie pans.