A Billion Birds Die in Plate Glass Plate

A Fatal Attraction - Tragedy Strikes When Birds Fly South for the Winter and Collide into Urban Glass Towers By Frank Mastropolo Nov. 13, 2006
Bird-watching is a classic American pastime; over $30 billion a year is spent on the hobby. We love to watch birds when they are in our backyards -- their native habitats -- but few of us realize the dangers the birds face during their seasonal migrations.
Between 100 million and one billion birds are killed every year in the United States when they crash into glass windows. And even one billion deaths might be a conservative estimate, says ornithologist Daniel Klem Jr. of Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pa.

What you can do

Find out how to help a bird that has flown into a building

A Billion Birds Die in Plate Glass Plate fritted glass

First produced in the third century and manufactured in large sheets since 1903 - is so commonplace, and so aesthetically pleasing, that we tend to think of it like air itself. That's exactly what birds mistake it for; they simply can't see it, which is why they fly into it. And die. "Short of habitat destruction, my studies clearly indicate, at least to me, that more birds are killed at sheet glass rather than any other human-associated avian mortality factor worldwide," he recites, with a requisite pause for effect. "Glass is not only universal, but also totally indiscriminate, killing the fit and the unfit."

SUMMARY . . .
Fatal reflections [1]  By Maryalice Yakutchik Sat, May. 10, 2003

Ornithologist Daniel Klem Jr.
named to the endowed chair as Sarkis Acopian Professor of Ornithology and Conservation Biology

484-664-3259
Muhlenberg College

Klem pulls down three white shades over the smallish windows of his first-floor office/lab. "I'm saving lives," Klem says, his wire-rimmed glasses now reflecting the white of the shades. "I'm saving lives."By temporarily whiting out three small transparent windows for several hours, he might alert birds to a seemingly insignificant and wholly ignored death trap. By closing three shades at high noon, he hopes to provide birds with lifesaving cues and avoid contributing to a phenomenon that, according to his research, kills as many as a billion birds a year in the United States. A billion dead birds. Just in the United States. Every year. Beak to tail, that's enough sparrow-size creatures to wrap around the equator four times. "If even only 100 million birds die each year in the United States from colliding with simple old plate glass" - Klem's most conservative estimate - "an equal number of victims would require approximately 333 Exxon Valdez oil spills."
Klem's research indicates that bird-glass collisions can be prevented if birds are confronted by "visual noise" on the outside of a window - cues spaced at no more than 2 inches horizontally and 4 inches vertically. Klem calls them "interference patterns" for creatures that have evolved to fly through a woodland cluttered with branches and tree limbs. The cues can be dots, stars, hawks, whatever. It's the spacing that's important, Klem says.
A seemingly effective pattern was chosen to be used in panes of fritted glass - glass with a frosted pattern created by fusing granules to the surface. The science center, still under construction, is a working experiment, with 60 percent of panes fritted in the dotted pattern and 40 percent totally transparent. At the green team's instruction, two of the fritted panes were installed unconventionally, with the fritting on the exterior, to test effectiveness and durability.
Klem offers four pages of insight about sheet glass being the most underappreciated lethal threat to birds.
"Short of habitat destruction, my studies clearly indicate, at least to me, that more birds are killed at sheet glass rather than any other human-associated avian mortality factor worldwide," he recites, with a requisite pause for effect. "Glass is not only universal, but also totally indiscriminate, killing the fit and the unfit."
Klem's research runs the gamut from observational data to field and lab studies. He has conducted window-kill surveys and monitored houses and commercial buildings. He has compared the collision rates of unaltered windows and those altered by placing objects on or around the glass. His necropsies of hundreds of collision victims shows that the most common cause of death is brain hemorrhage.
The ornithological community doesn't dispute Klem's conclusions. As far as he knows, no studies have been conducted that contradict his findings (and his expertise in other specialties such as hawks is well-respected). Although that might seem like tacit acknowledgment, in the posit-and-counterposit process of science he has been largely - and frustratingly - ignored.
He reminded the audience that a law was being ignored: the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which, among other things, forbids the killing of migratory birds. And then he asked again: "Do you know something I don't know?" He told them to go ahead and embarrass him; that he could take it. He beseeched them to tell him that he was barking up the wrong tree; that he was outright ridiculous. He had a couple of exhibits: a yellow-bellied sapsucker and a red-winged blackbird (a federal permit allows him to collect specimens) that had just died of brain hemorrhaging after colliding with glass in St. Louis, one of them having hit the building where the conference was being held.
Carr Everback an engineer who chairs environmental studies at Swarthmore College, Everback leads a "green team" working on a new science center there.
Everback believes that Klem's numbers (100 million to a billion deaths annually) are in the ballpark. He believes that glass, pretty and efficient though it is, does harm in the natural world; that it can wreak particular havoc on bird populations already at risk. That it has, as Klem insists, an additive effect to avian mortality; that endangered and threatened populations already on the knife edge of survival (stressed by natural and man-made threats, including habitat loss, disease, drought and plummeting prey) might be pushed beyond recovery by a universal, indiscriminate killer such as glass.
In 2000, the campus' resident hummingbird population was extirpated because of collisions with glass in college buildings. Swarthmore biology professor Timothy Williams advised that Everback should be concerned about the impact of glass on birds.
"We had known that Kohlberg Hall was killing birds," Williams said in a phone interview from New Hampshire where he, now emeritus, resides. "Students would bring many dead birds to us each spring. I was walking with Carr Everback right in front of the windows when a hummingbird smashed itself to death not 10 feet from us." A new science building, with even more glass, was being erected. "We knew something should be done."
There's more to come. Everback promises "thump detectors" on all the panes and Webcams that save frames before and after the thump "so we can see what hit and collect data on whether the fritted glass is effective or not."

--

The Wren is not yet forgotten in Ireland. It was thought to be the king of birds. It was hunted as the Cutty wren, and is still hunted on St. Stephen's Day, the 26th of December, the winter solstice. There, and in Western Scotland, it has been known as the Lady of Heaven's hen, with this refrain:--

"The wren! the wren! the king of all birds,
St. Stephen's Day was caught in the furze;
Although he is little, his family's great,
I pray you, good landlady, give us a trate."

The French hunt and kill it, devotionally, on Twelfth Day. Contributions should then be collected in a stocking. After the bird has been solemnly buried in the churchyard, a feast and a dance terminate the ceremony.

NPR : Windows: A Clear Danger to Birds
"Everbach and Klem recommended using so-called "fritted" glass. ... NIELSEN: To find out whether the fritted glass was really bird friendly, ..."
www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5076012

The Birds
          
are heading south, pulled
by a compass in the genes.
They are not fooled
by this odd November summer,
though we stand in our doorways
wearing cotton dresses.
We are watching them

as they swoop and gather--
the shadow of wings
falls over the heart.
When they rustle among
the empty branches, the trees
must think their lost leaves
have come back.

The birds are heading south,
instinct is the oldest story.
They fly over their doubles,
the mute weathervanes,
teaching all of us
with their tailfeathers
the true north.
                  Linda Pastan