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Expert Says Glass Is Major Threat to Birds
dlkf writes "According this AP article, 'Glass is ubiquitous and it's indiscriminate, killing the fit and the unfit... estimates (are) that collisions with glass kill up to 1 billion birds a year in the United States alone.' First wind turbines and now glass. What will they come up with next..."
Just like walls and other cars are a major threat to drivers, porn sites to computer geeks, and a job in the real world for all those heavily pierced freaks. I don't consider this THAT newsworthy... :)
(Not Trolling, just burning some midnight karma. :))
Viva La Revolucion! Buy a Mac!
...can't hurt you so relax Bob, and keep flying sou..[THUD!]
"Look mommy a dead parrot!"
NarratorDan
"If you're not confused by quantum mechanics, you really don't understand it." - Niels Bohr
Ban Glass !
The greedy Glass manufacturing Corperations are out to ruin our envrionment !.
Im not here now... Im out KILLING pepperoni
I hate birds.
- Peter
INsigNIFICANT
A Beowulf cluster of glass!
Wait, that's called a "building". Never mind.
I used to have a bird that crashed into my window every morning at 6:30 sharp. Then one day it stopped. I wondered if it moved but I guess it died.
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
The problem, of course, is not the glass; it's this pesky desire of ours to have transparent artificial barriers as part of our dwellings---something which will not go away.
Much of the time, my sympathies lie mostly with the animals; but in this case, they're kinda on their own. Survival of the fittest...
May they all live long enough to have more sex than I do...
(Which leads me to a deep thought: right now, at this very moment, millions (billions?) of creatures are having sex. None of them are me.)
Goddamn I need sleep...
...that's great. *Looks around uncomfortably*
Eating a leading cause of Heart Disease, Wisconsin man discovers that a red cape will not let you fly, Running full force into a wall "really DOES hurt" according to Arkansas resident, and Kids say the cutest things!!
yeesh.
Sera
Slashdot, where armchair scientists get shouted down and armchair theologians get modded up.
So do domestic cats. What of it.
Call it evolution in action
Choose your allies carefully, it is highly unlikely you will be held accountable for the actions of your enemies
In any event, this doesn't affect me. My cats will take down anything within a 100-ft radius of the house, so my windows stay thud-free.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
Secondly, most birds that conservationists (and yes, we are as scientific and geeky as the average /. er) are really worried about don't live in built-up areas so the impact with glass is likely to be less of a problem.
Thirdly, window stickers (especially those shaped like a hawk) can sharply reduce the level of impacts especially against windows that look like a fly-through to somewhere else.
And finally, when you find a bird that hit a window, someone will say it's broken its neck. Not so. Birds' necks are much longer and more flexible than most people realise until they see a lolling corpse. The commonest cause of death against a window is brain haemorrage.
...there's a big 6ft by 10ft glass pane in my house - at least once a month a bird (normally a pidgeon) whacks into it, normally either breaking a load of bones (in which case a guy from the RSPB comes round), or dies instantly. Once I've returned home to find the pane completely cracked with a duck lying in the grass...
Sometimes it's a bit of both. We used to have a cunning but lazy cat who would camp out under the big window, and pounce on the stunned birds that occasionally flew into it.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
Oh yes! Thankyou very much for the obligatory penis bird link.
..."smart" birds avoid running Windows ;)
Ron
I wonder if thats why my two tomcats seem to have such conniptions when a certain feral tom comes calling.
I guess if I had something like that happen to me, I might kill myself inadvertantly on the glass door at the quickie mart.
Evolution in action? If several whole species get completely wiped out from an ecosystem, then I wouldn't call that evolution.
Were they here to do it, I suspect the dinosaurs might be able to pursuade you otherwise.
Slashdot story from the Mysterious Future:
"Glass manufacturers release new bumper sticker: Glass doesn't kill birds, I kill birds!"
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Here in Austria we have the shadows of predator birds on most glass stuff that the goverment puts up.
Same here in America - at least in Florida and New Jersey. When I'm in states I don't live in, my eyes are on other issues so I woudn't recall seeing fake predator birds there. Owls.. lots of owls. Usually life size, life colored, realistically placed.
Its the WINDEX that people use! Lets be considerate people and not clean our windows, that way birds don't have to die meaninglessly.
Ban Reality TV!
A dozen times a day flying insects bang (surprisingly loudly) into my office windows.
Don't know how many get killed by it, though.
My dad was walking out of a store once and didn't use the door... they had just washed the windows and he had just taken off his glasses... The glass shattered and he still has scars down the front of his thighs...
My place of employment has glassed-in corridors between buildings, some of those corridors being multi-story. They have solved the bird problem by placing stick-on silhouettes of some sort of predatory bird, one on every other pane, or so. I haven't seen or heard of a collision, since.
But back when they were happening, the birds left a beautiful dust pattern on the windows as they hit. It captured incredible levels of detail to the feathers, etc.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
...because not enough birds are killed by them. How long d'ya reckon it'll be before someone organises the real-world equivalent of a Google-bombing to correct that oversight?
:-)
(Cue gun-rights flamewar, grin, duck, run
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
This is just another excuse for my neighbor who "loves animals" to not remove the half-inch layer of dirt from her windows.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
birds can get pretty big you know. even if you exclude ones that don't fly. of course it's probably got something to do with the beak.
This is my Sig, this is my Gun. One is for Slashdot and one is for Fun.
The bird probably survived because woodpeckers should be well equipped to deal with head-shocking events.
It's not often that you get to see these birds close up, not to mention hold them and quitely look at them. Quite an experience.
Flourescent (adj): smelling like ground wheat.
But... I bet the Austrians have some kangaroos tucked away in a zoo somewhere, to satisfy tourists who mistype their destinations. I know we've got the odd stone castle tucked away in case the misreading goes the other way. (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
This was twenty-odd years ago, in Paraburdoo. Cat would pretend to be dead, lying in the hot, hot sun until a crow got to the point of actually reaching out to have just a little... BLAM! rude shock. Same cat would regularly beat up and chase away quite large dogs. Never seemed to fight with ours, though.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I think that pretty much says it all. Stew on that.
...happy that emus don't fly. (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Seriously though, birds are particularly prone to hitting glass (and buildings) in areas of high light pollution (like New York) -- many scientific studies have been done on this -- see The Fatal Light Awareness Program and the ODP for general light-pollution info.
Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley
[This post is in the public domain (copyright-free) unless otherwise stated]
What will they come up with next? Uh... airplanes?
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Stop using windows! (the glass kind) There by increasing the amount of lights you need to use in the house (esp. in the summer time) and increasing power consumption!
Great googly moogly
No sig for you!!
But there are still plenty of those species. I'm more worried about some that have utterly disapeared in the 15 years I was away: no more swallows for instance. Global warming or excessive use of bug spray ?
Non-Linux Penguins ?
One of my neighbors had a 200-lb buck break through a sliding glass door into their living room, stomp around for a bit (spraying arterial blood over pretty much everything), and promptly leave. They think he might have been attracted by a miniature orange tree in their house. The buck died from blood loss about 10 feet from their house. They added curtains and a bunch of distracting plants in about a week.
Moral of the story - if people want to fix the problem of things hitting glass, they'll probably need a strong incentive - like having to replace most of their carpet and furniture because it is thoroughly saturated in deer blood.
"[Ornithologist Daniel Klem] estimates that only habitat destruction kills more birds [than flying into glass]."
Err... other than the bird slaughtering industry I presume? Eight billion chickens and a quarter billion turkeys are slaughtered annually by the poultry industry in the US.
Source: 2003 poultry stats from the US Dept of Agriculture
(page 5)
Look out honey, 'cause I'm using technology; Ain't got time to make no apology
What about people? Doesn't everybody here have at least one relative/friend who this has happened to?
Some years ago, one of the tasts that I had involved occasionally delivering some equipment for events at a nearby synagogue. The only place to park and unload was next to a glass wall that had two glass doors. One evening, when backing out in the dark, I didn't notice that the door was still open. Crunch!
The next day, when I went in to talk to the rabbi about it, first his secretary and then he laughed loudly. They had both done exactly the same thing.
Eventually they faced the problem, and put some highly-reflective stickers on the inside of the door. It looked unaesthetic from the inside, which was the main hall. But it ended the problem of a broken door every few months.
In any event, it's a bit odd to see a "news" story about problems with birds flying into glass. If you look at any birding mag from the past century, you'll find ads for stickers (mostly outlines of predatory birds like owls or falcons) to keep birds away. This has been a well-known problem ever since sheet glass was developed.
When the first "glass tower" skyscrapers started getting built back in the late 40's, there were stories about how a new task for the janatorial crew was to pick up the dead birds from the sidewalks.
So how did this get passed off as news?
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Reminds me of a Dilbert cartoon where a bird complains about the "forcefield" that is really a Window.
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
I guess it'd be ok to complain about glass that's not for seeing through but is just decorative like on some skyscrapers...
She used to have a real problem with the neighborhood birds picking on her cat and stealing its food. So she goes to one of those "Everything 99 Cents" sh8tholes and picks up a long cord of cheap bright yellow tinsel, the kind you'd spiral around a Christmas tree. She takes that tinsel and wraps it all over her porch railings- up and down around and around, so that it's everywhere. I don't know how much the neighbors' property values suffer but it sure keeps the birds away. It's almost as if they have taste. They don't want to be seen anywhere near that stuff.
PETA will have a field day with this. I pop over to their site every once in a while to get a good laugh. Sensationalism as its best!
(wont somebody please think of the birds?)
If 1,000,000,000 birds are killed each year in the USA where are all the bodies? I think someone would have noticed...
Remember that 1,000,000,000 dead birds means 1,000,000,000 easy meals for birds that know how to avoid windows. The ones that hit my greenhouse rarely last through the day before other critters, including birds, leave nothing but a pile of feathers.
For animals, an increase in the food supply usually means increased reproduction. So does this really have any impact on the birds population, or is it an increase in turnover?
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
From Pale Fire by V. Nabokov:
I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane;
I was the smudge of ashen fluff--and I
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.
And from the inside, too, I'd duplicate
Myself, my lamp, an apple on a plate:
Uncurtaining the night, I'd let dark glass
Hang all the furniture above the grass,
And how delightful when a fall of snow
Covered my glimpse of lawn and reached up so
As to make chair and bed exactly stand
Upon that snow, out in that crystal land!
Great book!
Ho Ho
I agree with your point. Except for the "that know how to avoid windows" assumption. Do they really know how to avoid windows? Or were they simply lucky enough to avoid windows on that day? If the latter, then the turnover is not assuring meals for the more fit birds. It's simply turnover.
Sounds like the study is probably funded by the Windex commercials featuring birds flying into glass windows. :-)
If you continue to have that problem you might look at fixing it :) Seriously just a couple of stickers will keep birds from hitting your windows. They used to run into the building here until they but them up (they look like silhouettes of swooping birds) and they stopped. Cheap and nonintrusive.
Don't get me wrong - it's a bad thing. But by definition, the birds that hit the glass and die before they reproduce are unfit. The real problem is that glass, um, moves the birds' cheese, changes the fitness function. We don't know how fast the birds will adapt to having to avoid transparent and reflective objects, so we ought to help them by not making so damn many of them.
The populations of birds are for the most part remaining stable. Those that declining are doing so for reasons other than running into windows. Therefore these birds happen to be dying by running into wondows rather than something else that would kill them at about the same rate, quite possibly starvation. Now, which is kinder?
Why not come to the aid of earthworms (which are far more beneficial then most birds) and tell everyone not to walk on the ground after it rains?
To keep most birds from running into windows, cut a piece of black paper or plastic into the shape of the sillouette of a raptor and stick it on the window. Stick it on the outside if reflection is a problem. Any that don't steer clear of a raptor's shadow might as well leave the gene pool.
The problem isn't that they're dying, it's that they're dying where they can be found by someone who can get the media to listen to them as they pretend that if it weren't for Evil Humans the poor birds would live forever.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
This was discussed on /. last year (2003) already.
My hyperlinks aren't worth the paper they're printed on.
Alaska Bugs Sweat Gold Nuggets
(What is an allision? When something bumps into a stationary object it is an allision, not a collision.)
In other news, predators kill billions of animals per year.
Where's the numbers to back up the assertion that 1 billion birds are slaughtered every day. 200 slaughters per skyscraper = 5 million skyscrapers. That's a lot of slaughtering by a lot of skyscrapers....
I have birds hitting my windows (reflective tint film makes them mirror finish, I guess), but I have yet to see one slaughtered in the process.
So, where's the science?
Sounds like more of the same
*Still* negative function...
One day I let my cat out in the back yard and was just sitting around drinking a beer. All of sudden I see a bird fly through the yard and right into the badminton net. It got stuck and I felt really bad so I spent about half an hour cutting it out of the net. One of the bird's wings was hurt so I set it off in a quiet place under some bushes and gave it some water. I checked on it later but it was gone.
I had a budgie once that cleverly flew into a ceiling fan and was flung across the room and slammed into a wall. After recovering from the shock he was no worse for wear and lived on for a few more years.
killing the fit and the unfit That's not how it works... If you die, you are unfit, by definition. Birds that can't see glass or can't withstand the impact are unfit for that environment. Fitness is not some subjective thing, it's a rule.
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
My parents are bird watchers and have created a "bird friendly" backyard meaning feeders, baths, a small pond, and trees and shrubs that birds like. (tho how "community" figured out a bluebird prefers a certain kind of house is beyond me.
Anyway my point is with all the little feathered friends flying around I have never seen one hit a window. So if one billion are killed every year, which would be like 3 for every man,woman or child in the US alone, shouldnt I see like 6 birds hit the glass every year.
It is better to be the hammer than the anvil.
Thats right now that we know windows kills birds we have yet another reason to use Linux. :)
Sorry it had to be said
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
There is a problem with your reasoning. Even if the total bird population is not going down, it is the population sizes of each species of bird that really matters. Species A and B could both be losing 20K birds a year to glass accidents, but if the population size of species A is one billion, and the population size of species B is 20K + 1, then there is a problem.
Main concern: Not that birds are dying, but that rare bird populations could be dying, i.e. we are going to have a hell of a lot of pigeons and starlings, and nothing else.
-A theoretical biologist with too much time
People for the Eating of Delicious Animals
I am one of many. My idea is not unique, nor do I expect my voice alone to sway you. I speak in a chorus of opinion.
or raptor silhoettes, both are available at reasonable cost from bird enthusiast suppliers. Theory is that these are things that birds notice. Raptors because they are dangerous, cobwebs because birds don't like having to clean them off their feathers. Of course, I don't know how many birds will be looking out for cobwebs at 250 ft altitude.
To hear the gods laugh tell them your plans.
You've successfully fended off every half-arsed 'argument' in this thread : )
It's lunchtime here, so I go now to vegan yum cha.
Vino, gyno, and techno -Bruce Sterling
UMMM.... can we say, "Natural Selection?" c'mon... say it with me.. "NATURAL SELECTION"