Bird Migration Season

During bird migration season, how can you help the birds avoiding to collide with your windows?

New York is part of the Atlantic Flyway, which many migrating birds use to reach warmer climates.  It’s a wonderful journey but too many of them will never reach their destinations. They will collide with glass windows and die. Glass windows are the greatest threat to migratory birds. Every year, near a billion birds are estimated to be killed after slamming into buildings covered in reflective glass in the United States.

Please draw blinds, curtains and/or shades in your apartment and lobbies. Please make the windows visible to birds and you will help saving their lives. Turn Off unnecessary interior lights during this Fall migration season!**

Keep your plants away from the windows; turn off unnecessary interior lights at night; if possible, hang ornaments in your windows; use decals and space them no more than every 4 inches horizontally and 2 inches apart vertically; or draw streaks with a highlighter (you will not see it but the birds will) or with a bar soap and after the migration, it can be easily washed out.

Each migration season, twice a year, nearly one third of the bird species found in the United States, diurnal and nocturnal, die by colliding with buildings.

Near a billion birds are estimated to be killed after slamming into buildings covered in reflective glass in the United States. Every year fast fliers like finches, hummingbirds, swallows etc. (considered diurnal or daytime migrants.) and the cuckoos, flycatchers, warblers, orioles, waterfowl  (nocturnal taking off within an hour of sunset and flying through the night) will never reach their destinations.

It is vital that we do all we can to minimize or better eliminate these dangers whenever possible.

The recently renovated Jacob K. Javits Convention Center is a terrific example, transformed from one of the deadliest structures into one of the most hospitable for birds. The building used to be the largest bird killer in NYC.

Read more:

http://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/animals/blogs/new-york-buildings-to-go-dark-during-bird-migration-season

Architects around the world have created fantastic bird friendly structures that incorporate little or no exposed glass i.e. New York Times building in NYC (by FX Fowle and Renzo Piano). However, designing a new structure to be bird friendly does not need to add much to the cost of construction. There are many different solutions.

The Wildlife Freedom Foundation encourages Cornell Tech and Hudson Related to implement sustainable bird-friendly construction on Roosevelt Island.