Up to a billion die in the US a year from colliding into mirror-like surfaces
Straits Times 17 Sep 11;
NEW YORK: Most bird-watching enthusiasts spend their days looking up in the hope of seeing a flash of colour.
Ms Deborah Laurel looks at the ground. She is a volunteer with New York City Audubon conservation group, and during the weeks of the autumn migration, she is part of a dawn patrol that scans the sidewalks of Manhattan, searching for victims of the city's forest of glass towers. The other morning, she spied the bodies of six that had collided with the plate-glass ferry terminal at the World Financial Centre.
'We live in an age of glass,' said Ms Laurel, an architect. 'It can be a perfect mirror in certain lights, and the larger the glass, the more dangerous it is.'
New York is a major stopover for migratory birds on the Atlantic flyway, and an estimated 90,000 birds are killed by flying into buildings in New York City each year, the Audubon group says.
Often, they strike the lower levels of facades after foraging in nearby parks. Some ornithologists and conservationists say such crashes are the second-leading cause of death for migrating birds after habitat loss, with estimates of the national toll as high as a billion a year.
As glass towers have proliferated in the last decade, so too have calls to make them less deadly to birds. The San Francisco Planning Commission adopted bird-safety standards for new buildings in July, and this month, the city's Board of Supervisors will vote on making it law. Legislation is pending in Washington that would require many federal buildings to incorporate bird-friendly designs.
The United States Green Building Council, a non-profit industry group encouraging the creation of environmentally conscious buildings, will introduce a bird-safety credit this autumn as part of its Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design certification process.
There are no easy fixes, however. A few manufacturers are exploring glass designs that use ultraviolet signals visible only to birds, but these are still in their infancy. Opaque or translucent films, decals, dot patterns, shades, mesh screens and even nets are the main options, but are a tough sell in the high-design world.
NYC Audubon, the American Bird Conservancy and other groups are actively pressing for their use.
A group of NYC Audubon volunteers is gathering evidence of bird collisions this autumn at a dozen buildings, including some of the city's most prominent structures, like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the World Financial Centre and the Time Warner Centre. Most of the sites were chosen because they feature glass walls next to parkland or vegetation.
Since 1997, when the collision-monitoring programme began, NYC Audubon has collected nearly 6,000 dead birds, carefully bagging and documenting them. The group has used the findings to ask for modifications to buildings that prove to be the worst offenders.
Often, only one section of a building is a culprit. 'You don't necessarily have to treat every window,' said NYC Audubon executive director Glenn Phillips.
The Jacob K. Javits Convention Centre, now undergoing renovation, is the most recent building to voluntarily correct the problem of bird collisions. After pleas from NYC Audubon, architects FXFowle designed retrofitting that includes less reflective glass and a dot pattern.
Some new all-glass buildings are designed so that birds can easily detect them. Conservationists point to Frank Gehry's IAC Building as an example. Horizontal, dotted white bands control the flow of light, while the curvilinear facade prevents a mirror effect.
About 90 New York buildings also participate in Lights Out New York, NYC Audubon's initiative to get buildings to turn off lights after midnight during the spring and autumn migrations as bright lights attract and confuse birds. Cities like Boston, Chicago and Toronto also have successful lights-out campaigns.
Exterior lighting is one of many elements in the Green Building Council's new bird-collision deterrence credit. Said Mr Brendan Owens, a council vice-president: 'I don't know of any architects out there who want to kill birds.'
NEW YORK TIMES
