Photographs and Writing by Quinn Freidenburg
Most fall mornings, Yuko Miki steps out into the cold air of downtown Toronto to search for dead or injured birds. Toronto is a common stopping point for birds migrating south for the winter, many of them making their journeys at night, resting and eating during the days. As she walks through the streets, she looks around the base of buildings with large glass windows where birds may have had a collision. A staggering 25 million birds are estimated to die every year in Canada from building collisions, and nearly a billion in North America.
Yuko Miki rescues an injured bird in downtown Toronto, ON on Oct. 8, 2023.
“It doesn't matter the size, it doesn't matter the location, if there is untreated glass, the birds will collide,” says Yuko, a FLAP volunteer. FLAP, the Fatal Light Awareness Program, is an organization focused on reducing the number of collisions of birds with buildings. Yuko joined the organization as a volunteer when she retired during Covid, and is now a very active member of the community, doing frequent patrols in downtown Toronto. While birds can collide with any glass in the downtown area, a few factors drastically increase the rates of collisions.
A park or courtyard with trees, shrubs, and a fountain may seem like the perfect thing for a bird trying to survive in the city, but these spaces concentrate the birds into a sort of death trap. And the culprit? Glass.
A planted courtyard with mirror windows in downtown Toronto, ON on Oct. 10, 2023.
Glass, particularly around green spaces, acts as a mirror that confuses birds with a false image of trees or bushes in reflections. In their confusion, birds will fly straight into the glass, and many will either fall to their deaths, or sustain injuries that ground them, leaving them vulnerable to gulls and other predators.
(Top) A dead bird lies on the ground in Toronto, O.N., after colliding with a building on Oct. 8, 2023 (Left) Untreated glass on a commercial building in Markham, O.N. (Right) A bird Skeleton lies in a storm drain next to a building in Markham, O.N. and Oct. 9, 2023. Most birds that die from collisions are not found and are left to decompose right where they fell.
FLAP volunteers get out early in the morning for their patrols to find birds that collided the previous night, hoping to beat the gulls, rats, and squirrels scavenging for breakfast. When a dead bird is found, volunteers record the location of the building and the species of the bird. Dead birds are bagged and moved to freezers, where FLAP stores them for research and education. The data from these collections are used in a number ways, including the Global Bird Collision Mapper, a FLAP-managed website that tracks collisions around the world to help understand how, where, and why birds collide.
Mark Peck opens the Royal Ontario Museums bird collection on Oct. 10, 2023. Many of the birds that FLAP collects end up in the museums collection for display and research.
Mark Peck, an ornithologist at the Royal Ontario Museum, has been working with FLAP for years, helping them store many of the birds found in a large walk-in freezer. He also supports local students and researchers by providing DNA samples of different species of birds in the area. Peck’s work ensures that these birds aren’t thrown away or forgotten, but are rather used for research.
While countless birds are found dead every migration, some survive their collision, yet are left injured and disoriented. Often, injured birds will not survive in the wild. While many of them may still be able to fly after their collision, they frequently die in the following days from injuries like broken beaks, broken bones, or other impact-related injuries. Whenever a FLAP volunteer finds an injured bird it is captured using a small net, put in a paper bag, and rushed to an animal shelter, where it can be examined and rehabilitated.
Yuko Miki attempts to catch an injured Cat Bird in Toronto, O.N. on Oct. 8, 2023.
Yuko Miki hands off a bag of injured birds to a fellow volunteer to take them to a rehabilitation center on Oct. 8, 2023.
So what can be done to prevent collisions from happening? Fortunately for the birds, a simple and highly effective solution has been developed, produced, and is on the market today - window treatments. While decals like hawk cutouts spaced on windows have been shown to have little to no effect, grids of dots or lines spaced out on the exterior of glass are up to 99% effective in preventing collisions. These patterns of dots, primarily 2x2 inch grids, create enough contrast on the face of windows that the birds avoid them. But this simple solution has had a very hard time getting traction.
People do not want their views obstructed, and window treatments aren’t free. Frequently building owners view them as an unnecessary expense; in fact, in order to have one of the highest bird killing buildings in Toronto put on the dot patterns, the owners had to be taken to court and forced to put them up. Now that building almost never kills a bird. So there it is, a solution on the market to save millions, if not billions, of birds, but little appetite for change. Treating glass is expensive, and many people simply do not care enough to make bird-safe glass a priority.
Treated glass in downtown Toronto on Oct. 8, 2023
On October 5th, 2023, over a thousand birds died in one day from hitting a single building in Chicago. One might think that this was a rare event that would serve as a wake-up call for the owners of that building, but conservation groups wrote to the owners about the problem multiple times over the years. It was the owners’ choice not to heed their advice.
Birds colliding with windows is not a new problem; It has been a problem for decades and people have been fighting for the lives of these birds. Ultimately, however, the fate of billions of birds lies with building owners and their decisions either to treat their glass or not.
Photographs and writing by Quinn Freidenburg
