Birds

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.

Bird population decline

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I have my doubts about studies that show that the bird population has declined by 30% since the 1970s.

Canada Goose

For one, DDT use was widespread in the early seventies and that was widely known to cause egg shells of eagles and many other birds to be thin and crack easily.

Two, I have to wonder if the Christmas Bird counts which the study is based on have methodology errors – like fewer people participating today compared to 1970.

Third, blaming neo-nicotines for the decline in birds and butterflies is popular today but how strong is the evidence when these chemicals have short lives and are largely biodegradable and buried underground as seed coatings to protect seeds prior to germination from pests?

It’s good to question and wonder. But we need more science and more answers before we shout ban everything.

Huge decline in songbirds linked to neonicotinoids

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Huge decline in songbirds linked to neonicotinoids

The world's most widely used insecticide has been linked to the dramatic decline in songbirds in North America. A first ever study of birds in the wild found that a migrating songbird that ate the equivalent of one or two seeds treated with a neonicotinoid insecticide suffered immediate weight loss, forcing it to delay its journey.

Although the birds recovered, the delay could severely harm their chances of surviving and reproducing, say the Canadian researchers whose study is published today in Science.

More Than 1 in 4 Birds Has Disappeared in the Last 50 Years | All About Birds

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Vanishing: More Than 1 in 4 Birds Has Disappeared in the Last 50 Years | All About Birds

The scale of loss portrayed in the Science study is unlike anything recorded in modern natural history. While the Passenger Pigeon likewise suffered cascading losses more than a century ago, that was a population loss among one species, mostly in eastern North America. This research portrays massive losses among hundreds of species of birds from coast to coast.

The population models in this study are based on several decades of standardized bird-survey datasets. This research represents the most robust synthesis of long-term population monitoring data ever assembled for animals, says Adam Smith, a study coauthor and biostatistician for Environment and Climate Change Canada.

“It’s safe to say that in the natural world, birds are the best studied group of wildlife species,” Smith said. “The data that exist for birds are just so incredible, from 50 years of the North American Breeding Bird Survey and the Christmas Bird Counters from 100 years ago, on to the eBirders of today.

House Cat Bounty

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I think the solution to the decline of a birds is
a $100 bounty on every house cat found outdoors.

Cats are the Number 1 Threat to Birds

Predation by domestic cats is the number-one direct, human-caused threat to birds in the United States and Canada.

In the United States alone, outdoor cats kill approximately 2.4 billion birds every year. Although this number may seem unbelievable, it represents the combined impact of tens of millions of outdoor cats. Each outdoor cat plays a part.

Three billion North American birds have vanished since 1970, surveys show | Science | AAAS

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Three billion North American birds have vanished since 1970, surveys show | Science | AAAS

North America's birds are disappearing from the skies at a rate that's shocking even to ornithologists. Since the 1970s, the continent has lost 3 billion birds, nearly 30% of the total, and even common birds such as sparrows and blackbirds are in decline, U.S. and Canadian researchers report this week online in Science. "It's staggering," says first author Ken Rosenberg, a conservation scientist at the Cornell University Laboratory of Ornithology. The findings raise fears that some familiar species could go the way of the passenger pigeon, a species once so abundant that its extinction in the early 1900s seemed unthinkable.