PORTLAND, Maine — The numbers are staggering. According to statistics cited by Maine Audubon, nearly a billion birds in the U.S. are killed each year when they crash into windows.
"Birds don’t know what windows are," Nick Lund of Maine Audubon said. "If you think about it, windows are kind of weird. They are reflective, and so if you’re a bird flying through, you think you're seeing the sky or habitat. Or if lit from within, windows are just invisible."
For four years, a group called BirdSafe Maine—composed of Maine Audubon, the University of Southern Maine, and the Portland Society of Architects—has been working to raise awareness of the bird strike problem and its solutions. It recently honored several companies, schools, and individuals for taking action that is, happily, not particularly difficult. Merely putting bird-safe decals on windows reduces strikes dramatically.
"Those are a series of stickers or etched patterns on the windows," Portland architect Alex Haba said. "They basically create little squares that birds perceive as places you cannot go through."
It's a simple solution but highly effective, especially in high-rise structures with a lot of glass. The MEMIC office building in Portland's Old Port, for example, once had a high number of bird strikes. Working together, MEMIC and BirdSafe Maine placed decals on windows, then sat back to watch the results.
"They cut their strikes down to zero in our monitoring," Lund said. "We weren't surprised, but it's always nice to have it verified to see how well it works."