Not much is funny about the ugly business of birds crashing into objects they find in their way – resulting in 350 million to 1 billion bird deaths a year.
But you have to admire the humor mustered when Smith College students in Northampton rallied to address the hazards of a place on campus known as “bird-death bridge.”
That glass-enclosed passageway between Sabin-Reid and McConnell halls was a notorious kill zone for birds, since they tended to see reflections of clouds and blue sky ahead – not the hard glass barrier.
Once put on the case, Smith administrators and students developed a way to signal to birds that this, for them, was a bridge to nowhere. Since being installed, the solution they found appears to have entirely prevented bird collisions.
Students in a class led by Prof. David Smith did their part by documenting which campus buildings posed the biggest threat to birds. They gathered their findings in a report they called – wait for it – “Saving Two Birds with One Decal.”
Naturally, that study carried a subtitle to make it sound a bit more science-y: “Mitigating Bird-Window Collisions on the Smith Campus.”
And mitigate they did.
This all got started two years ago when a Smith alumna, Sheena See of Florence, was crestfallen to discover eight cedar waxwings lying lifeless beneath the “bird-death bridge.”
See went looking for answers. She found Margaret Lamb, administrative director of the Clark Science Center, to be willing to help. Lamb then helped enlist others, including Gary Hartwell, who works in facilities management.
As Gazette reporter Fran Ryan explained in a recent Environment section story, Hartwell went looking for products that might prove more effective in chasing away birds than the black silhouettes of hawks that had been affixed to the glass passageway. The many cedar waxwings littering the ground beneath the bridge showed those silhouettes to be of little use.
According to the American Bird Conservancy, 600 million birds die in collisions with windows every year in the U.S. That toll is dwarfed by the 2.4 billion killed by domestic cats, but more than the 200 million hit by cars, the 25 million that strike power lines and the 6.6 million that collide with communications towers. The figures are from the conservancy’s 2014 State of the Birds report.
For people who care about the environment, those numbers can’t help but raise policy questions. So it’s no surprise that Prof. Smith, who directs the college’s Environmental Science and Policy Program, jumped in by having his students use GPS mapping to rank the campus buildings most hazardous to birds. Along with the glass bridge, they noted that birds collide often with the school’s indoor track and tennis facility.
The solution now in place – a costly polyester film with a silicon liner – works because it understands the bird brain. The film contains thin vertical lines 3 inches apart. Though they may not detect the glass, birds are able to perceive that they can’t fit through those lines, which scarcely register with the human eye.
They bank left, or right, and live to fly another day. The fix didn’t come cheap. The film cost $35,000. But if Smith was to be serious about environmental policy studies, it needed to acknowledge the impact its buildings have on the natural world.
The world just got a little safer for birds. If that matters to you, and you own a cat, there’s something you can do. You don’t need to wrap your cat in polyester film, just a collar with a bell.