The city of Kalamazoo is hoping to educate residents on how to prevent birds from colliding with windows. It’s co-hosting an event with the Audubon Society of Kalamazoo Wednesday evening.
The event will begin at 6:30pm at Kalamazoo’s Arthur Washington, Jr. Crosstown Center on Crosstown Parkway.
Justin Gish is the city’s sustainability planner. He says the event will go over the different ways to make windows bird-safe.
“It could be as simple as just painting dots onto your windows. Some folks buy screens that you can hang up over you the outside of your window. And then some folks will replace their windows entirely and have etched glass, " he said.
Gish added that these techniques allow birds to see the window as a barrier instead of something they can fly through, and said that they are especially important during migration season.
“Hundreds of thousands of birds are migrating overhead. Cornell's website said 391,000 birds flew over last night," Girsh said on Sept. 22.(The Cornell Lab of Ornithology has a website that lets people track migrating bird numbers in real time.)
"So, we're really trying to make the environment the birds are passing through as safe as possible for them.”
Transparent, unmarked window glass can be deadly for birds.
“They'll see maybe space or houseplants on the other side of the window and think that they can fly through it," Gish said. "Or the window will reflect trees and they'll assume that those are trees and then, you know, they should be safe to fly through those. And once the birds hit the windows, they generally die.”
Gish says hundreds of millions of birds die each year in the U.S. due to preventable window strikes. Some estimates are even higher. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service puts the total at over a billion, and also makes recommendations on preventing bird strikes.
