Divya Anantharaman shines her flashlight under the wooden benches that surround an office tower near Wall Street. At those hours, the New York streets They are the exclusive domain of the early risers.
Starting his weekly search-and-rescue mission at sunrise is essential, he says. Look for the victims of the glass buildings: the birds who have died starry against the windows. As soon as it dawns, the doormen sweep the sidewalks, and thus the bodies that serve as evidence would be lost.
Anantharaman volunteers with NYC Audubon, an organization dedicated to protecting the city’s wild bird life and habitat. She inspects every dark corner she passes, even peeking through planters to make sure she doesn’t miss any collision victims she can rescue. At the end of her round, she finds a dead bird under a shiny glass flyover that connects two buildings.
It’s an American woodcock, he thinks, a Migratory bird relatively common long bill. Each spring, woodcocks make their way through New York after spending the cold months in Alabama and other Gulf Coast states. The bird is stiff, which means it has recently died, Anantharaman explains. “The eyes are still very clear, so it could have happened a few minutes ago.” He Takes photos. He takes a solemn moment to thumb the bird’s eyelids shut and stuffs the carcass into his pink backpack.
A victim of a collision with a window in New York City.
A billion birds and more and more
Every year, between 90,000 and 230,000 birds are killed after colliding with buildings in New York., according to NYC Audubon estimates. The city’s density of illuminated buildings is a dangerous obstacle for winged travelers, especially during the spring and fall migratory seasons.
New York is on a migratory route to South America, where many birds spend the winter. Birds orient themselves by the stars, so artificial light at night attracts and disorients them. Believing they are flying towards the light of the stars, the birds stray and land in the middle of an unknown metropolis. “The biggest problem is reflective glass,” explains Kaitlyn Parkins, a biologist at NYC Audubon. “Birds don’t recognize reflections. If they see the reflection of a tree, for them it is a tree. They fly towards it, they can accelerate very quickly, and they die instantly.”
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In the US, where most of the research on bird strikes has been conducted, buildings are responsible for the death of up to a billion birds a yearas calculated by pioneering ornithologist Daniel Klem in the 1990s. But glass windows are death traps all over the world.
“Birds are vulnerable to glass, because they can’t see the damn stuff,” Klem says. He stresses that it’s not skyscrapers, but low- and mid-rise buildings that are the biggest danger.
Klem, who is now a professor at Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania, sees window strikes as a fundamental problem for bird conservation. “In terms of threat, I would put the collision right after habitat destruction,” he says. “The insidious thing is that windows kill indiscriminately. They also take the fittest specimens of the population. We cannot afford to lose any individual, let alone good breeders.”
A dead woodcock on the streets of New York.
an international problem
In recent years, groups conservationists and scientists They have taken up this issue. Binbin Li heads one of two groups that monitor bird strikes in China. She is an adjunct professor of environmental sciences at Duke Kunshan University and a PhD from Duke in the United States. There she met the principal investigator of the university project.
“At first I thought the problem was only in Duke, or in the United States. I couldn’t imagine finding something similar, in China,” he says. But upon his return, he received reports of three dead birds on campus within a month.
Together with a group of students, he now counts birds killed in flight on campus in Suzhou. Many of the victims, she points out, are found under glass walkways, like the woodcock Divya Anantharaman found in New York.
Li has launched a nationwide survey to get a more accurate picture of the problem. Three major migration routes traverse China, but data on deaths along these routes are still limited. “We realized that bird strikes are not well known in China, even in academia,” Li says.
Just change the glass and turn off the lights
In Costa Rica, Rose Marie Menacho had to convince her professors to allow her to research bird strikes as a PhD student eight years ago. “They didn’t know much about this, they didn’t know it was a real problem,” she recalls. “Even I was a bit embarrassed to talk about my research. I was a little embarrassed because I thought it wasn’t that important.”
now work with some 500 volunteers to assess the magnitude of the problem in the tropics. Some keep the feathered carcasses in their freezers, others send him reports and photos. “It’s not just migratory species that collide,” he says. His volunteers have also recovered vibrantly colored quetzals and toucans with fancy bills. Both are local species.
Volunteers preserve samples to determine what kind of birds live with the problem.
“Collisions kill a lot of birds that already have to deal with habitat loss, climate change, pesticides, etc.,” says Parkins. “And yet the problem is very easy to solve – just change the windows and turn off the lights.”
With the data collected, Parkins and his team try to convince the owners of glass buildings in New York to take action. In general, it is not necessary to replace the glass. You can place a special foil to reduce reflection, which also saves energy for heating and cooling. Window markings also help birds recognize the structure.
New York City adopted new legislation in January that now requires lights in public buildings to be turned off at night during bird migration season. Since last year, architects have also been required to plan bird-friendly designs in all new buildings, such as ultraviolet coating on glass, which is visible to birds but not to humans. These measures help enormously, according to Parkins. Following the bird-friendly renovation of the Javits Convention Center, 90 percent fewer dead birds were found in the vicinity of the building.
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The new regulations are a good start
On the sidewalk in front of Brookfield Place, a huge shopping and office center on the southern tip of Manhattan, Rob Coover inspects a small bird. It’s not dawn yet, but he’s been looking for dead birds for half an hour now.
He looks carefully behind a stack of chairs, which workers at a cafeteria will soon be placing on their terrace. She has already had to bend over a tiny, stiff corpse twice to take photos. Now she again takes rubber gloves and plastic bags out of her backpack to collect and preserve a body.
On one occasion, Coover found 27 birds in a single morning. A fellow volunteer made international news when she collected 226 lifeless birds around One World Trade Center in a single hour in September 2021.
“It’s pretty depressing to come across all these bodies,” says Coover. Sometimes he finds a survivor and takes the injured animal to a bird sanctuary. The carcasses often end up in his freezer until he has time to take them to the conservation group headquarters. , where they are collected and sometimes distributed to museums.”Before the pandemic, I would go to work after my rounds and put them in the office freezer. Nobody noticed, ”she adds.
In the US and Canada, volunteers are active in various communities, and the list of local governments enacting laws to protect building birds is growing. According to the nonprofit American Bird Conservancy, the New York law is one of the most effective. After studying bird strikes for almost half a century, Daniel Klem is delighted. He finally sees the growing awareness that he expected.
“Climate change is also a very serious issue, nobody wants to divert attention from it. But it’s very complex and it’s going to take us a while to understand it and convince people to act responsibly. Bird strikes is something we could resolve tomorrow. It’s not complicated. You just have to do it,” he concludes.
Source: DW