Because birds can’t perceive glass, especially when lit up from the inside at night, they fly into windows and are killed.
Every once in a while Penny Martyn thumps a tennis ball or a small toy mouse against the glass window in her office.
Existing buildings can be retrofitted in various ways — and that’s where the monitor, designed by a group of UBC engineering students, might help. Vancouver is on the Pacific Flyway, a north-south transit route for migratory birds. According to the Audubon Society, a billion landbirds, seabirds and waders — including western sandpipers, hummingbirds, pigeons, finches, sparrows and crows — use the path that sweeps through Alaska, Alberta, B.C., Yukon and Northwest Territories, and down to Arizona, California and Mexico — and the number of birds on the Flyway has dropped precipitously in the last century.
While De Groot lauds the Vancouver park board, which retrofitted their Stanley Park headquarters with bird-friendly glass, she said, “every municipality needs to do more.” In 1993, he and some friends founded FLAP to protect nocturnal migrating birds that become attracted to the bright lights of the city, specifically lights flooding from the glass windows of buildings.
The north-south mountain ranges that guide migrating birds on the Pacific Flyway have lush vegetation so birds that fall out of migration are less likely to encounter tall structures. However, collisions with buildings are much worse in foggy or drizzly conditions, because birds are forced to fly at a lower altitude.
The Earth Sciences Building features a grid of exterior screens that has the dual benefit of reducing solar heat gain within the building, and providing a visual that is defined enough to protect birds.
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