Liz Cates had heard that sickening thump at her living room window.
One of the first things she did when she became interested in birds over a decade ago was to set up a feeder array outside the Bern Township home she shares with her husband, Dan.
“I remember being really unnerved every time a bird hit the window,” she said. “Although I didn’t find dead or injured birds as a result, I knew what I had outside couldn’t have been a good arrangement.”
During some online research, she came across the Acopian BirdSavers (https://www.birdsavers.com), a system that utilizes lengths of paracord spaced 4 inches apart and hung outside the windows to break up the sky outline reflected in the windows.
“It has worked very well,” Cates said. “Window strikes are now a rarity. This is an inexpensive solution to a deadly problem.”
This simple technology has the potential to save the lives of millions of birds.
And it’s one of the technologies developed by Dr. Daniel J. Klem Jr., whose recently published book, “Solid Air: Invisible Killer — Saving Billions of Birds from Windows” (solidairbook.com), chronicles his 48-year study on the detrimental effect windows have on bird populations and offers solutions to this world-wide problem.
Klem, 75, is the Sarkis Acopian Professor of Ornithology and Conservation Biology at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, where he has been a professor for 43 years and has emerged as the leading authority on windows and bird strikes.
“Between 365 million and a billion birds are killed by window strikes annually,” Klem said during a recent interview. “On the low side that’s one million birds dying every day, and most of them are hitting our homes.”
His goal is for architects and planners to transform windows into barriers that birds will see and avoid.
Klem first became interested in window strikes at the urging of an ornithology professor at Southern Illinois University in 1974.
“I had never heard about birds flying into windows,” he said, “but he did and had specimens that had been turned into him by the university.”
The next day at 5 a.m., Klem sat on a bench in front of a glass-covered building on campus to watch.
“As soon as it got light, a mourning dove flew through a leafless tree and smashed right into the glass façade in front of me and dropped dead on the bottom of the panes,” he recalled. “I went and picked it up. I was stunned.”
He walked through the campus looking for corridors between buildings that had clear glass and other reflective surfaces.
“I found feathers and skeletons and smudges on the windows, and from that day on I was hooked,” he said.
In the United States alone, his research has documented that at least 278 species of birds have been killed by striking windows.
“But it’s only within the last five to10 years that people have realized and begun to understand the level of carnage taking place and has excited them into action,” he said.
Klem’s book will go a long way to further educate not only birders but all homeowners, businesses and governments to the simple solutions that can help preserve declining bird populations.
“It’s written for every citizen on the planet,” he said, “and it’s my latest attempt to capture a critical mass of the public to force developers and architects and legislators to institute these protective measures to produce an environment that will be safe for these animals.”
His quest is catching on.
Klem believes using the paracords as Cates does and using the Feather Friendly decals, as can be seen at the Visitors Center at Middle Creek Wildlife Management Area in Kleinfeltersville, Lebanon County, are two good short-term options.
Brant Portner, environmental education specialist at Middle Creek, explained the systems the Pennsylvania Game Commission has employed on its windows at the center.
“On the back windows that look out on the native plant garden, fields, and lake are small dots — the Feather Friendly decals — evenly distributed across the window that birds will see and realize it’s not an open area to fly through,” he said. “These dots are spaced far enough apart that they don’t obstruct binoculars. On the rest of the windows, we have a ‘one-way’ covering where you don’t really see inside but you can see looking outside. Again, birds would not try to fly into what looks like a solid surface.”
Klem’s long-term solution is to encourage the production and use of novel glass that incorporates the features that would make windows visible to birds.
That’s the approach that was taken at The Nature Place at Angelica Creek Park in Reading.
“Our bird strike reduction glass is one of our most popular green features at The Nature Place,” said Tami Shimp, vice president of development and community relations at Berks Nature. “Everything we demonstrate at TNP is intended to help others change behavior for the benefit of the environment. There are other, less expensive, options to deter bird strikes that people can implement at home, work or school. We even sell decals in our store at TNP.”
Klem reviewed the specifications along with his Muhlenberg colleague, Peter G. Saenger of the Acopian Center for Ornithology, and recommended the windows installed at The Nature Place.
“Featuring some of the best anti-bird strike features on the market today, the windows installed at The Nature Place are AviProtek by Walker Glass,” Shimp said. “An acid-etched glass with a horizontal-striped pattern, the windows feature stripes spaced 2 inches apart to discourage bird strikes.”
Klem’s work has proved that next to habitat destruction, the glass in our buildings is a major killer of birds.
“We can solve this thing tomorrow,” Klem said. “We could make our building environment safe tomorrow if people just had the will.”
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