JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
We are in the height of the fall migration season. Hundreds of millions of birds are taking to the skies every evening. They fly south through the night, navigating with the help of the moon and the stars. One of the biggest threats they face is glass. Window glass is either invisible or it reflects the trees and sky. So when birds are migrating, lots and lots of birds crash into windows. Efforts to prevent this have recently taken on some new momentum. NPR's Nell Greenfieldboyce explains why.
NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE, BYLINE: Just after dawn, downtown Washington, D.C., is quiet. Very few cars are on the streets. Stephanie Haley (ph) is walking next to an office building, scanning the sidewalk. There's pieces of trash, leaves, and then...
STEPHANIE HALEY: This looks like it might be a bird.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: A tiny, olive-green songbird is huddled there. It's alive but not moving until it's gently covered with a net.
(SOUNDBITE OF BIRD CHIRPING)
GREENFIELDBOYCE: This Acadian flycatcher was on its way to Central or South America. Then it hit this glass-covered building. Now, despite its protests, it's going inside a brown paper bag.
(SOUNDBITE OF PAPER BAG CRINKLING)
HALEY: OK. This is a good sign - the fluttering - which means that hopefully he's got enough, you know - he's just stunned. And I'll take him to City Wildlife, and the doctors will check him out.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: City Wildlife is a local rescue service. When I call them later, they say they tried to treat this bird. They even put it in an oxygen chamber, but it died. Most collision victims don't survive. It's estimated that at least a billion birds die this way every year in the U.S. They have brain injuries, broken bones.
LISBETH FUISZ: I mean, they can be flying, like, up to 30 miles an hour when they hit the glass. So it's a very loud thunk.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: That's Lisbeth Fuisz. She and Stephanie Haley are part of a group called Lights Out DC that walks a set route through the city every single morning during migration season trying to find dead or injured birds before the rats get them or before custodians sweep them away. Their work shows that a half dozen buildings seem to be death traps.
FUISZ: Yeah, this is a problematic building.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: On North Capitol Street, there's an office complex that wraps around a plaza with two sections that converge on a big, glass atrium. Fuisz says that birds get funneled towards a multistory wall of glass.
FUISZ: And do you see how the reflection works? It looks like you could keep going.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: On top of the revolving door, she spots a small, dead bird. That's where it fell after hitting the glass wall.
FUISZ: So that's a pretty common window collision victim. That is a female yellowthroat.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: She carefully records the death. Similar data collection efforts are going on across the country in places like Chicago, Philadelphia, Dallas, San Diego. The goal is to reveal the scale of a problem that's mostly invisible, though occasionally, something dramatic happens.
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IRIKA SARGENT: An unusual situation at McCormick Place today - nearly a thousand birds found dead.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: On the night of October 4, 2023, hundreds of migrating birds slammed into McCormick Place Convention Center in Chicago. This made headlines nationwide. Tina Phillips is with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
TINA PHILLIPS: People who never even thought about birds were suddenly like, wait a minute, a thousand birds died in one night, crashing into one building?
GREENFIELDBOYCE: This incident inspired the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to convene a big summit, inviting birding groups, government agencies, architecture firms and dark sky groups that want to minimize artificial light. Phillips says they'd all been trying to prevent birds from hitting buildings, but separately.
PHILLIPS: And so coming out of that meeting, we knew we needed to keep working together to really try to make this impact meaningful.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: They recently formed the Bird Collision Prevention Alliance. More than a hundred organizations have joined, including federal agencies. They've now got working groups that meet frequently. This comes as the Trump administration has weakened federal protections for migratory birds. But members say this alliance isn't about pushing policy at the national level.
BRYAN LENZ: We're just focusing on the science, and we're focusing on what's the best way to save birds at scale without getting bogged down in political conversations.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Bryan Lenz is with the American Bird Conservancy. He says in the past, it wasn't really known how to keep birds away from glass.
LENZ: People used to say, put a hawk decal on your window, and it's good because the birds will be scared of that. The only thing that does is keep the birds from hitting the hawk decal.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: He says now there's new kinds of glass and window treatments that have been shown to really work. Take that convention center in Chicago. Patrick Allen is the chief operating officer.
PATRICK ALLEN: We were a big piece of glass sitting right out on the lake. So - and there's no doubt the reflections would attract the birds.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: After the high-profile mass collision, managers decided to put an easy-to-install product on the windows.
ALLEN: It's just nothing but a film with dots in a particular pattern. You put it on the window, and you pull the film back off, and the dots stay on.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: This treatment reduced bird collisions by 95%.
ALLEN: You know, the numbers are awesome. We're very proud of it.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Doing this cost over a million bucks. He says that's only because they had a huge expanse of glass - enough to cover two football fields.
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GREENFIELDBOYCE: Back in downtown D.C., a volunteer named Stephanie Dalke is searching the ground for the stunned and the dead. She says some buildings here have made changes, like turning off nighttime lights that can attract the birds.
STEPHANIE DALKE: You would think that most buildings would care and want to fix the problem. Although it turns out that it can be complicated and expensive to treat a commercial building.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: And because birds tend to hit windows down low, below the tree line, a big part of the problem is smaller buildings and houses.
DALKE: Which is why it's great to just educate everybody about the topic, 'cause you can fix it at home too.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: She tells me that D.C. recently passed a bird-friendly building law. It's one of only a few major cities in the nation to do so. But the law only applies to new construction, not what's already here, like this skyway she shows me. It connects two buildings, and it's made of mirrored glass.
DALKE: We call this the walkway of death. So this is a very deadly spot.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: There on the ground is a dead ruby-throated hummingbird. It's tiny - the size of her thumb - with iridescent green feathers. It still had a long way to go on its migration.
DALKE: It's just - it boggles the mind to think that these little guys can fly over the Gulf of Mexico. Just how do they manage that? It's amazing. But then we take them out with some glass.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: She notes the location and date so this bird can go in their database.
(SOUNDBITE OF ZIPPER UNZIPPING)
GREENFIELDBOYCE: She takes a photo. Her cell phone is filled with hundreds of pictures of window collision victims. And then she keeps walking, looking for more and hoping not to find them.
Nell Greenfieldboyce, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF KACEY MUSGRAVES SONG, "BUTTERFLIES") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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