![]() The previous week, volunteers found 138 birds. The dead and injured birds we encountered were among 62 individuals collected by PSF volunteers that week. What follows are the scenes and stories of a single day of spring migration in New York. We also dispatched a team to Wild Bird Fund (WBF), the Manhattan wildlife rehabilitation facility that takes in and treats injured birds brought to them by PSF volunteers and good Samaritans across the city. On May 16 we sent reporters and photographers out with volunteers from Project Safe Flight (PSF), an effort led by New York City Audubon to document birds that strike buildings and windows across the city during migration. So, we used BirdCast, a migration forecasting tool created by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, to choose a date when a flood of birds was expected to pass through the city. We wanted to better understand the building-collision problem and give readers a fuller sense of its impact. And as Lights Out programs around the country are finding, turning off nonessential lighting during migration keeps many birds out of harm’s way. Design decisions, choices of construction materials, and bird-friendly treatments added to existing windows can reduce collisions. These deaths are especially troubling in our age of major declines in bird populations. Others say the annual total likely reaches 1 billion birds. That’s more than 3,000 times the death toll from collisions with wind turbines. Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that as many as 988 million birds die in building-glass collisions each year. Disoriented and exhausted, perhaps drawn to inviting vegetation reflected or framed by a window, they crash as they try to escape.Īt a national scale, these losses pile up: The U.S. During migration, artificial lights lure birds into the thick of the city, where they find themselves surrounded by a house of mirrors. Every year, up to 230,000 birds meet an untimely death in New York City by colliding with building glass.
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