Bird-Safe Penn State: How to Help Reduce Window Collisions on Campus

Right now, millions of birds are wending their way north for their breeding season. Some, like the blackpoll warbler, could be traveling from central Peru all the way to Alaska. Not only is this a difficult journey—migration is the riskiest time for birds—but we humans haven’t made their trip any easier. While there are a number of factors that human civilization has introduced to impede their journey (like habitat loss, outdoor cats or bright lights at night) there is one major factor that actually has a fairly simple solution: window strikes.

Estimates of nearly one billion birds (billion with a “B”!) are killed each year from window collisions across North America. These are not just a result of the headline grabbing events in big cities, such as last year when about 1,000 birds died in a single day after hitting the McCormick Place Lakeside Center in Chicago. In fact, residential and “mid-rise” (i.e., under 10 stories) buildings account for the vast majority of window strikes. Scattered across millions of buildings around the continent, more than a million birds per day are killed, mostly unnoticed.

Unfortunately, here at Penn State, years of effort from student, faculty, staff and community volunteers inventorying bird strikes has found that University Park has a particularly bad offender: the Bridge to the Life Sciences, where about 150 of the 700+ documented bird window collisions at University Park campus have taken place.

The beautiful glass breezeway that connects Chemistry and the Huck Life Sciences Building has three critical issues when it comes to bird strikes. The first issue is the attractive bird habitat nearby. A long line of red oaks on both sides of Shortlidge Road stretch from College Avenue up to Park Avenue—an ideal strip of habitat for migratory birds. The second issue is that the glass walkway allows birds to look through the breezeway to see the trees on the far side, which they may fly toward at great speed, unaware of the glass barrier in between. The third issue is reflection. At certain times of day, the glass provides a mirror image of the bushes, trees, and sky behind the bird, and again they may fly toward the reflection at great speeds, hitting the glass.

The good news is that we know there are solutions.

For example, for new buildings such as the Susan Welch Liberal Arts Building and the new Palmer Museum beside The Arboretum, key parts of their glass have been built with bird friendly modifications—spotted patterns on the outer surface of the panes. Birds moving toward the glass can see these dots and slow down, recognizing them as obstructions.

For already constructed buildings, like the Life Sciences Bridge, different solutions are also possible. In fact, Penn State’s Office of Physical Plant and the University Architects have approved the application of “bird friendly” dots to the Life Science Bridge. These opaque stickers, which can last over 10 years even with washing, when spaced every 2 inches on the outside of the glass the dots break up the reflections and have greater than 95% effectiveness at reducing collisions (and don’t impede the view for humans).

The problem with this solution, for this and other campus buildings, is that there is a lot of glass, nearly 15,000 square feet by our estimate for the bridge. At that scale, costs are a significant impediment to progress, particularly when there are so many other (rightfully important!) priorities across the university.

A Giving Tuesday campaign last fall was extremely successful, with more individual donors for this cause than any other at Penn State that cycle, and raised over $15,000. However, this is still far from enough money to treat the windows of the bridge by this method. So here we are, another spring migration upon us, without any protection on the Life Sciences Bridge, where likely many more birds will die or be seriously injured, contributing to the loss of nearly 30% of birds in North America since 1970.

Our intention in writing this is to build awareness of the problems of bird strikes and their solutions, focused specifically on the leading offender at University Park. We genuinely feel that, in a world of seemingly unsolvable biodiversity and climate crises, this one has a clear, tangible solution.

If you are interested in learning more about helping solve window strikes at Penn State and beyond, you can follow a student-run Instagram on this subject ( @birdsafepennstate ) or contact j99@psu.edu to get involved with volunteer window collision monitoring and advocacy. To contribute to bird safety, visit sustainability.psu.edu and “Make a Gift” to “Bird Safe Penn State."

Joseph Gyekis is an associate teaching professor of biobehavioral health and David Toews is an assistant professor of biology at Penn State. The views they express are their own, and not reflective of their academic units.

The post Bird-Safe Penn State: How to Help Reduce Window Collisions on Campus appeared first on StateCollege.com .