Atlanta volunteers study birds colliding with buildings during spring migration – WABE

“About 990,000 people passed through Fulton County last night,” Osborne said.

But city lights attract migratory birds, and Osborne says the confusion can cause birds to hit windows.

She and Bryan stay near the edges of buildings, looking for stunned or dead birds that have fallen to the ground. They start their work early in the morning to beat cleaning crews and scavengers who might pick up the birds before them.

“I’m always shocked every time I see one,” Osborne said. “I love birds, and this is just a way for you to think that maybe you can help a little.”

Bryan has been volunteering for a little longer. She said that while looking for dead birds in the morning, she has made a lot of friends, people who ask her what she does and want to know more about birds.

But not all interactions go so well.

“Now look, they put this door in here because of me,” Bryan said.

Some security guards aren’t exactly keen on seeing women with flashlights prowling around their buildings at dawn, but they are a regular occurrence.

Volunteers and Birds Georgia are taking the opportunity to educate staff and buildings about the problem of bird collisions.

“It’s like the worst lesson for birds,” Bryan said.

And for Osborne, it’s a harsh prospect given the scale of the problem.

“I’m always shocked every time I see one,” she said.

But this morning was a good morning. By the time the light shone on the skyscrapers, Osborne and Bryan had found no birds.

This is not to say that no birds were collected before their arrival, nor that there won’t be bird collisions soon, but in the meantime, they are victorious.

If they find a stunned bird, Bryan said they are trained to transport it to a local rehabilitator. If the bird is dead, they pass it on to researchers.

Adam Betuel, director of conservation at Birds Georgia, said after collecting data on the dead birds, they send the specimens to research universities.

“We’ve sent birds to UGA, Oglethorpe and even Puebla, Colorado,” Betuel said. “But most of them go to the University of North Georgia.”

The director said the specimens are used for everything from ornithology teaching labs to museum collections to genome research. The data collected by volunteers can be used to raise awareness of the problem.

Overall, Betuel said the program has collected nearly 5,000 individuals of more than 130 species.

The scale of the problem is much larger than most people might think, Betuel said.

“Best estimates are that between 350 million and 1 billion birds die each year in the United States alone from running into buildings, which is solely responsible for habitat loss and the presence of cats in outdoors,” Betuel said.

Most of the birds passing through Atlanta are neotropical, meaning they have flown thousands of miles across various countries and the Gulf.

The city is at the convergence of three major migratory routes. It also has great resources like the Chattahoochee that attract birds.

“All that, and then they run into a building — it’s so unnecessary,” Betuel said.

Birds can hit windows at any time of year, but it’s especially worse during migration. Betuel said many people don’t realize that birds migrate at night and that light pollution and ambient light confuse birds. It’s like a moth and a porch light, he said.

Once the birds are lured into the city, the glass creates a mirror maze.

“Often birds don’t understand that a transparent barrier, or a transparent facade, is a barrier,” Betuel said.

The birds will try to fly through the glass with all their might. Otherwise, he said scenery such as trees would be reflected in the glass and look to birds like a good place to fly to or perch, causing them to crash at high speed against the glass.

The good news, he says, is that solutions already exist. For existing buildings, there are a multitude of products that adhere to the exterior of windows and allow birds to see that windows are not permeable surfaces.

But for buildings not yet built, Betuel said there are even better and sleeker options. There are windows, like those at Birds Georgia’s new office building in Adair Park, that look like regular windows but have tiny dots between the panes so birds can see them.

Not only do they look sleeker, he said, but research has shown that these windows are very effective in preventing bird collisions.

“There are some very elegant, minimalist approaches where you can still have all the natural light, you’ll still have your view and you won’t have dead or injured birds under the windows either,” Betuel said.

These solutions are aimed at all types of buildings. While skyscrapers seem to hit birds more often in the sky, Betuel said the “overwhelming majority” of collisions occur in the lower 40 to 50 feet of a building where vegetation is reflected.

He said Birds Georgia also encourages residences and commercial properties to use smarter lighting at night, such as shielding lights down, especially during migration season.

Several buildings around the metro area are working on these solutions.

For example, Betuel said the Chattahoochee Nature Center in Roswell, the Southface Institute in Old Fourth Ward and Camp Jekyll on the coast have adopted some of these measures.

But modernizing the city, building by building, is tedious and slow, Betuel said.

He added that while looking to expand the solution, Birds Georgia is looking for bird-friendly glass solutions in construction and ordinances or laws to include bird-safe glass in the design process.