‘We have to stop losing so many’
Yale works to keep birds from flying into buildings and dying
NEW HAVEN — It’s safe to assume many of the dead birds found on Yale University’s campus weren’t victims of some predator, according to research scholar Viveca Morris, but of an “indiscriminate killer:” glass windows.
Morris is a leader of the Yale Bird-Friendly Building Initiative and executive director of the Law, Ethics and Animals Program at the Yale Law School. The initiative works to make Yale buildings more sustainable for wildlife and researches bird friendly building laws across the country.
She and others are preparing for the initiative’s fourth season of “carcass surveys.” Since 2018, more than 2,000 collisions have taken place on and near Yale, according to a report.
“A predator going after a bird is more likely to catch a bird that’s already sick or injured in some way, whereas buildings will kill birds of all levels of fitness, age and so forth,” Morris said.
After pet cats, building collisions are the top human-caused killer of birds, including sparrows, chickadees and finches, research shows. It comes as bird populations are on the decline with nearly three billion fewer birds in North America compared to 50 years ago.
The decline is concerning to ornithologists. Birds eat disease-spreading insects and rodents, pollinate plants, help with forest regeneration and contribute to the ecosystem in many ways. Morris and others are working to reduce the problem.
Starting in April, a group will spend eight weeks walking routes of 50 buildings that have features like glass facades that “create deadly optical illusions,” Morris said. Films and patterns can be added to the glass to make them more visible to birds, Morris said.
One major culprit is the tall, glassy School of Management building on Whitney Avenue. It’s currently being retrofitted with a more bird friendly design, as is the School of Nursing building on West Campus.
“In 2022, a pilot installation of Feather Friendly window film was installed on a portion of the back of the building,” Morris said. “It has worked beautifully to reduce collisions, but currently only covers a small portion of the problematic facades.”
Other buildings have been built with bird friendly design in mind from the start, like the new economics building on Trumbull Street.
The initiative gives the dead birds to the Yale Peabody Museum, one of the initiative partners, for education and research. Yale Facilities, the Yale Sustainability Office and the nonprofit American Bird Conservancy are also partners.
“Often when you pick up these birds that are being killed by the building, they look perfect, so they’re sort of perfect specimens, and so beautiful and so lightweight,” Morris said. “It is very sad and it’s just beauty wasted and could absolutely be saved.”
Along with building collisions, another large
reason for the dwindling bird population is habitat loss caused by development and climate change, according to Tom Anderson, director of communications for the Connecticut Audubon Society.
Anderson said birds are good indicators of environmental quality. The organization conducts habitat improvement efforts across the state, many with local partners.
“Lots of cities do lots of good things, and every city could be doing a little bit more,” Anderson said.
Anderson said there’s not one solution, nor a quick solution.
“We might not gain back the three billion birds,” he said, “but at the very least we have to stop losing so many birds.”