ON THE WING
There was a thud at my study window as I was typing my bird column. I didn’t need to go to the panes to see what had made the noise. I was pretty sure it was a bird strike.
I try to shield my windows to reduce reflection of green leaf and sky, which might lead birds to believe they are flying into open space. My home is prone to occasional bird strike. The house sits on the edge of the bush and in the delirium of mating in spring and summer, or fleeing predators in winter, birds can be unaware of its dangers.
Hearing the thud, I opened the window to look outside. There on the path was a silvereye, wings flailing, struggling to right itself on spindly legs. I lifted it into cupped hands and brought it inside. Soft and warm in my hands, its little eyes staring at me, I marvelled at its beauty, never fully gleaned when silvereyes are in fast flight, flitting about the grevilleas and bottlebrushes.
The ring around the eye, of course, is white and not silver. The beautiful mossy green feathers on the back, the grey on the chest and belly, and the orange flashes on its flanks, the extent of which distinguishes the Tasmanian subspecies of silvereye from those found on the mainland.
A bird in the hand, stunned, blinking. I hoped it would recover in a box in a quiet corner of the house, planning a trip to the vet if it did not get to its feet. But within seconds its head flopped across my fingers — another corpse for the bird cemetery under the wattles at the end of my garden, but thankfully there have been just a handful over the 18 years I have lived in the Waterworks Valley.
By coincidence, the latest strike came as BirdLife Australia was launching a campaign to minimise bird strikes which, across the world, kill colossal numbers of birds each year. Figures of Australian mortality are hard to come by but extensive research in the US suggests up to a billion birds a year might die there from striking the fabric of buildings, windows included. In Britain, it’s estimated 30 million birds die each year in this way.
BirdLife Australia’s Birds in Backyard Program is probing the scale of the problem. The group is asking members and the public to report bird strikes involving windows and cars, using an online survey at https:// www.surveymonkey.com/r/aussiebirdstrike