Prevent Window Collisions
BirdScreen: Flexible fiberglass - birds bounce off.
Renown field guide author David Allen Sibley may have come up with an easy way to deter birds from flying into windows. However, he admits the method has not been thoroughly tested and continues to endorse BirdScreen as the best way for significantly reducing or eliminating bird deaths from window collisions.
One of our BirdScreen'd windows.
As the makers of BirdScreen testify on their website, I have also observed birds fly into our anti-collision fiberglass screens, bounce off, and resume their regular activities. As someone who immensely enjoys backyard birds by attracting them with food and water, I feel it's my obligation to ensure flyways around our house are safe ones.
White-crowned Sparrow refreshes itself at a birdbath.
Sibley writes:
"Estimates of the number of birds killed in window collisions each year in North America run as high as nearly a billion birds. It's the biggest source of direct human-caused mortality in wild birds. But a simple means to prevent birds from hitting windows on your house or office could be in your desk drawer, or at least as close as your local office supply store, costing only a couple of dollars and a few minutes of your time. This needs further testing, but it appears that an ordinary yellow highlighter can be used to draw lines on the window, and those lines may be visible to birds, warning them away from the window, but are almost invisible to people."
Link: More information on Sibley's anti-collision tests.
Link: BirdScreen
All images © 2007 Mike McDowell
posted by Mike McDowell @ 5:12 AM
3 comments
3 Comments:
Birds do have more sophisticated retinas than we do, and many birds can see UV quite well, so I am not surprised to see this working. I'll have to investigate this some, but it may very well be an easy fix for the window companies to implement in manufacturing or as an add on.
Fortunately my windows have these fake crossbars on them, so we don't get birds crashing into them. I remember that happening often when I was a kid--we had 2, huge, picture windows they couldn't see. Fortunately mom was often able to bring them in (before the cat got to them,) & teach me how to rehabilitate them. Of course, it would have been so much better had these screens been available back then...Great idea. Thanks for sharing.
I put some photos of different successful window treatments on my webpage here:
http://www.lauraerickson.com/101/02-House/006-windows.html
I spent a day talking to Dr. Daniel Klem, who did the original research on window mortality for many years, and spent a lot of time talking to people at the Fatal Lights Awareness Program about window mortality, too, while researching this material.
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