Birds and buildings often are a bad combination. When birds roost on rooftops and window ledges, they can become nuisances for occupants, cause damage to key exterior components and block air intakes with their nests. When they take flight, buildings too often pose fatal threats, due to their clear or hard-to-detect glass facades.
Now, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) Migratory Bird Program has taken a series of steps designed to minimize and even eliminate the threats that buildings pose to birds in flight.
Each year, up to 1 billion birds in North America are killed in collisions with glass. Many of these collisions are with building windows. Such collisions are especially a threat during spring and fall migration seasons when large numbers of birds are on the move. Luckily, human-caused sources of bird mortality, like collision hazards, are preventable. In response to this alarming issue, the USFWS's Migratory Bird Program has identified high-priority actions that will have an immediate positive impact on reducing the number of bird collisions with buildings across the United States.
One of the first steps has been to promote and implement bird-friendly glass treatments, facility design and construction at our buildings and with our federal partners. In 2021, the USFWS Northeast region started a nationwide Bird Safe Building Survey initiative. The Migratory Birds Program Collisions Team developed metrics to use the survey data to identify the highest risk USFWS buildings to retrofit with bird-friendly glass treatments. Since then, more than 2,300 USFWS buildings have been surveyed for collision risks across the country.
The Northeast regional office staff retrofit the three stories of exterior windows at their headquarters office in Massachusetts and organized and led a workshop session at Patuxent Research Refuge in Maryland to teach service employees across the region how to retrofit their windows. The service also recently implemented a nationwide policy that mandates all new buildings to be bird-friendly, with the aim of stopping bird collisions at its facilities by the end of fiscal year 2031.
Dan Hounsell is senior editor of the facilities market. He has more than 30 years of experience writing about facilities maintenance, engineering and management.
