Why Birds Hit Windows—and How You Can Help Prevent It | All About Birds

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Why Birds Hit Windows—and How You Can Help Prevent It | All About Birds

There are two main types of window collisions: daytime and nighttime. In daylight, birds crash into windows because they see reflections of vegetation or see through the glass to potted plants or vegetation on the other side. At night, nocturnal migrants (including most songbirds) crash because they fly into lighted windows. Some of these nighttime collisions are due to chance, but much more often the nocturnal migrants are lured to their deaths by the lights. For reasons not entirely understood, lights divert nocturnal migrants from their original path, especially in low-ceiling or foggy conditions. In the lighted area, they mill about, sometimes colliding with one another or the lighted structure. The Fatal Light Awareness Program, based in Toronto, Canada, has much more about this problem.

There’s one additional reason: birds sometimes see their reflection in a window and attack it. This happens most frequently in the spring when territoriality is high. Although it can be annoying to the homeowner, it’s seldom a threat to the bird’s survival. Most of the remedies suggested below for window strikes will also help solve the problem of a bird attacking its reflection.

The Smells of October Road Trip

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The Smells of the October Road Trip

What can I say, life is full of smells, some good, some a little more offensive.

Mike Pence on his dairy farm channel often jokes about smell-o-vision, so one can enjoy the good and bad smells of life on a dairy farm from freshly chopped silage and hay to manure to sour silage. No smell-a-vision here either, only words.

Susquehanna River from I-88

Diesel Exhaust

Driving down along Interstate 88 you could smell the semi-trucks and diesel fuel and exhaust. Trucks certainly can smell although with the cleaner diesels not so much.

Chopping Silage

Silage has a very sweet smell when it’s freshly chopped. It’s a very farm-like smell but a nice smell.

Being watched as the sun set

Cow Manure

Hard to go many places in Upstate New York or Pennsylvania in good farm country and not smell cows and the even more pungent smell of cow manure.

Paper Plant

Paper plants have a distinctive sulfur smell. It’s really obnoxious if your not used to it, almost makes your eyes want to water and wonder when it.

Burn Baby Burn

Burning Garbage

Lots of folks in rural Pennsylvania burn their garbage. It’s a pungent, sharp smell, chemical but in some ways depending what folks are burning on a particular day, not that pungent.

Oil Wells

Oil wells in the Allegheny National Forest have a distinctive oil-smell like you might smell during an oil change, only sweeter. Sweet crude has a very distinctive smell.

Oil Well

Oil Refinery

Oil refineries smell a lot like the oil wells, although maybe a lot stronger and sweeter. I wouldn’t say oil or oil refinery exactly smells bad but it sure is pungent.

Chicken and Turkey Farms

Some of the chicken and turkey farms have a particularly earthy smell. Maybe not that pungent but what you might normally smell in a chicken barn.

Mount Storm

Coal Stove

Anthracite coal and especially bituminous coal has a very distinctive smell. It smells like coal, somewhat like burning garbage or kerosene but not as strong or acrid.

Kerosene Heat

A lot of trailers and rural households use kerosene because it’s can be purchased and transported in a regular gas can, and works in both portable heaters and some small heaters in mobile homes. Kind of pungent sulfurly smell, but very different then coal.

Coal Fired Power Plant

Coal power plants have a coal smell, a bit of a sulfury, mechanical smell. A smell like old machinery and coal.

Corn In The Sweedlin Valley

Chicken Processing Plants

Moorefield and Keyser West Viriginia are home to many large chicken and turkey processing plants. Depending on the breeze, they can be pungent, reminding me a lot of smell of raw meat you might get at the store.

Landfills

Landfills have a methane smell that is more chemical, more bleachy or toxic smelling from the landfill methane. Definately a lot more sour and less sweet then what you might smell on a farm or from sweet crude oil

House 5007

Wood Smoke

A lot of households in rural Pennsylvania also heat with wood. Generally wood is a pretty pleasant smell although it depends on the concentration and what exactly folks are burning.

Acid rain consensus cloudy | News, Sports, Jobs – Adirondack Daily Enterprise

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Acid rain consensus cloudy | News, Sports, Jobs – Adirondack Daily Enterprise

Last week the Adirondack Council issued a statement on acid rain in the Adirondacks, linking increasing pollution from Midwest power plants to a rise in the acidity of clouds here and saying, “It is troubling to see acid rain re-emerge as a threat to the Adirondack Park.”

The researchers who collected that cloud data, while agreeing with the Council on the need to keep acid rain at bay, disagreed that the cloud pH levels have “reversed their previous trends.” They said a drop between 2016 and 2017 was “minor” and “a natural variation.” They also said that the latest data shows the acidity of Adirondack clouds continues to improve.

I think it's a mistake to say that running flue gas desulfurizaiton is free or universally good. Just because a few plants are operating without using the FGD stacks running due to equipment failure, doesn't mean that the acid rain cap and trade program is not working. Sulfur credits are cheap, because it's working so well. Capturing sulfur dioxide is both very energy intensive (more carbon emissions) and uses a lot of space to landfill the often contaminated gypsum.