99% Invisible - 485- Murder Most Fowl

Episode Date: April 6, 2022

While urban parks are safe havens for birds, parks are often surrounded by condos and hotels and office buildings with floor-to-ceiling windows. And these all-glass building facades are the absolute worst for migrating birds. Because unlike people, birds don’t really understand glass.It’s believed that building collisions are one of the biggest causes of bird death. Birds crash into buildings during the day because they don’t see the glass, and they run into buildings at night because they are lured in by artificial lighting. Most of these collisions happen below 100 feet, because that’s where birds are used to landing in trees.Murder Most Fowl

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Humans and birds don't have much in common. For example, most birds can fly, and most humans can't. But one thing we do have in common is that humans and birds both love to play tourists in New York City. Every year, millions of birds fly to New York on their annual migration, and because flying several thousand miles is pretty exhausting,

these birds nest for a few days in one of NYC's many urban parks. I live really near Book and Bidge Park and I've basically walked in the park almost every day of the pandemic. But I always saw it through the eyes of, you know, somebody who's an architecture critic, but I'd never really perceived it as a bird habitat. This is Design Critic in front of the show, Alexander Lang. I would see people, you know, tweeting pictures of birds from Brooklyn Ridge Park.

And so I'd think, oh, I should, you know, notice those. But I just, it's like I didn't know how to notice them. Alexander wanted to know more about the birds passing through her city And wrote an article about it for the website city lab last November She emailed two local birders and they showed her all the birds quietly nesting in her favorite park And then we have the Ravens nest to do about that This is the Ravens nested on the tower of the Proconvrede about that. So the Ravens nested on the tower of the Procuretion. Oh, that's the third, the third ever on record Raven nest. They shown me this bird that they call the Butterbutt.

Oh, I see. Okay. So like, some people call them Butterbutt. Its real name is the yellow romp warbler, this FYI. I don't know if that's any more dignified than butter but, you know. It was so fun to see just that like, flash of bright yellow in the park. You know, it was already November, like everything was very gray and brown and kind of sear. And just to have somebody point and see that like, flash of yellow, that was just great.

But as Alexander walked to the park, she noticed something else, something that unnerved her. While Brooklyn Bridge Park is a safe haven for birds, the park is surrounded by condos and hotels and office buildings with floor-to-sealing windows. These all glass building facades are the absolute worst for migrating birds. Because unlike people, birds don't really understand glass. I mean, this has happened in cities all over the US and all over the world. That there's been this boom in urban parks, but those parks' booms also spur real estate development. It's glass buildings because those are what we think of as fancy new architecture.

Anytime you have glass and birds in the same space, you have a risk of bird window collisions. This is Caitlin Parkins, the interim director of conservation and science at New York City Audubon. I often hear people say, oh birds are so dull and they just run into glass. Why don't they see it? And if you step back and think of it, it's made not to be seen, right? It's made so that we can look through our window and get a beautiful view of the outdoors. We see glass because we use architectural cues to

recognize that it's present, or we've learned some of the nuance of the color of glass or maybe there's a mark on the glass that makes us realize, okay, this is a solid barrier. Birds can't really pick up on those cues. This is especially bad if there's anything behind the glass. The bird recognizes like a plant. So if you can imagine a really reflective piece of glass and there's a tree in it. A bird is going to see that and recognize it as a tree and try to fly to it and they're very fast and they hit very hard and often they die instantly. Another example, this is an ecological trap, but we put vegetation behind glass. We love atrium with trees in them. We want to bring nature indoors. Well, then you're actually just putting a clear piece of glass between a tree and a bird. And of course, they're going to try

to fly to the tree and rest and hit the glass and potentially die. The world is incredibly perilous for birds, windmills kill birds, so do cars and trucks. And on top of that, pet cats kill so many birds, truly. Cats are out of control. However, it's believed that building collisions are one of the biggest causes of bird death. Birds crash into buildings during the day because they don't see the glass, and they run into buildings at night because they are lured in by artificial lighting. Most of these collisions happen below 100 feet because that's where birds are used to landing in trees. This loss is awful for so many reasons. Birds are essential for controlling pests and pollinating flowers and regenerating forests.

And watching birds and listening to bird song is just really nice. We don't have exact numbers on how many birds we kill because there is no bird census But even the lowest estimates are devastating According to the Audubon Society buildings kill 300 million to a billion birds per year like a billion birds I mean, that's the high end of the estimate like these are definitely like I noticed when I was looking back through the stats Very broad estimates, but it's a lot of birds. These collisions are a major reason the bird population in North America is in decline.

One study found that we've lost three billion birds since the 1970s. Again, we don't have exact numbers, which is why organizations around the world hold collision walks. Every week, groups like NYC Audubon organized volunteers to document the number of dead birds next to skyscrapers. Here's Caitlin Parkinson's. It started back in 1997 when one of our board members

started just noticing dead birds on the sidewalk and actually didn't even know it was causing it. And she and some volunteers started walking the streets, documenting bird window collisions, picking up dead birds, and of course transporting injured birds to rehabilitation centers. So when our volunteers find a bird that's been stunned, they put it into a paper bag, and a paper bag is the best transport vehicle. They're like little bird ambulances. If you want to see this in action, there's a video on YouTube of Caitlyn helping stunned birds in a New York City park.

Sort of let the bird out and let it choose to leave when it wants to. So I'm just going to open this bag. This bird is ready, ready, ready to go. Go ahead. There he goes. We actually don't know how many of those birds make it. We expect that many of them, even if they recover from the immediate trauma, probably have long-term trauma and probably often don't make it much further. According to Kaelin, stunned and wounded birds are the exception. Most birds that collide with buildings are killed instantly.

The Audemont volunteers spent a lot of their time picking up dead birds and bringing them back to a freezer at their office in Manhattan. Eventually, those carcasses get donated to museums for museum collections. It's kind of a nice way of having these birds go to some sort of useful scientific or educational purpose because they were needlessly killed, but it somehow feels a little bit better

that at least they're going towards some greater good. Still, these collision walks are really difficult for the volunteers and staff at NYC Audubon. Caitlin Parkins vividly remembers a day last fall that lives in New York Berder, infamy. October 6th, 2021. There was really heavy migration. There was also a pretty intense storm and low cloud cover and that brings birds down low into the city. So I started getting text messages around 6.30 in the morning. So I started getting text messages around 6.30 in the morning. Volunteers were saying, I can't pick up all of these birds. I'm watching birds hit. I'm trying to pick up the stunned birds. I need help.

I had a black pole warbler die in my hand. I watched it, hit a window at Columbus Circle, and I picked it up, and it was convulsing in my hand, and there's nothing that I could do in that moment. I knew that bird was going to die. The bird collisions that day were especially traumatic for volunteers in downtown Manhattan, particularly those who monitor the new towers at the World Trade Center site. Tower 4 is designed by Japanese architect Fumihiko Maki, and it's known as bird-anime number one because of its design. The tower is basically a floor-length mirror of a building, and it's an exactly the wrong place. The other aspect of why that particular site is deadly is the memorial grove of trees around

the footprint fountains for the deaths on 9-11. Those are a very broad tree canopy that's right in close proximity to these buildings. That morning, a volunteer for NYC Audubon named Melissa Breyer got to the World Trade Center buildings and what she found became big news around the world. That's a bird. They're being found. She went to the World Trade Center site and she found over 200 dead birds there that day.

And she actually arranged them and kind of aggrid and attached the photos to the tweet. And I really think it went viral because seeing that many tiny, fragile, dead birds all in one tweet was just very overwhelming. It was picked up on Twitter, it was picked up by the media, we started getting all kinds of media inquiries as terrible as that event was. It brought a lot of awareness to the issue. This is clearly not an acceptable state of affairs. These are really some of the newest, shiniest buildings in New York.

Why are we allowing them to do this to birds? When it comes to bird collisions, there's a lot we can do. For nighttime collisions, we can turn off lights and empty skyscrapers, which are tempting from migrating birds. And for daytime collisions, good design can go a long way. In fact, there are design solutions that can bring down bird deaths by 80% or 90%. And they're pretty straightforward. It's all about making buildings more legible for birds.

You can break up an all-glass facade with colored fins or solid barriers, or you can design a building with bird-safe glass that's covered in patterns or small dots, or bird doesn't see the glass as transparent. According to Alexander Lang, there are many great examples of bird-safe design on the New York skyline. Like, I think one of the best examples

is the New York Times Building, which was designed by Renzo Piano and has this exterior screen of ceramic rods, which are two inches or so apart. So that's a building that happens to be great for birds because they see the rods and they don't see the glass and so they don't smack into it. Today, many architects are consulting burgers while planning new buildings around the country.

One example is the Amazon campus that's being constructed in Northern Virginia. The original designs were less than ideal. The centerpiece of this new Amazon campus that they're building in Virginia is this building called the Helix, which is a curving glass building with a path spiraling up the outside and the whole path is going to be planted with trees. So for a bird that basically means at any point from the bottom to the top of the building,

they could easily get distracted, try to land on a tree and smack into the glass. Amazon hired a landscape architect named Kate Orf to work on the project. And right away, she noticed the serious problems with the facade. Kate Orf is a birder, is somebody that's been a real activist on bird safety, helped to write some earlier guidelines with Audubon Society. And so when she saw the design for this building, she was basically like, well, I can't be a party to this. See what you will about Amazon as a company, but they listened to Tukate Orph and the burgers on this one. All of the glass that is adjacent to the trees on this building

either has a frit or it's colored or there are external fins or spines that will be spaced, you know, two inches apart so that birds will perceive the building and not just smack into it. It's not just architects and planners getting wise to bird safety. Cities are also adopting new rules about bird safe design. Toronto approved regulations in 2010 that require new buildings to use 85% bird safe class on lower levels. And more recently, cities like New York and San Francisco have adopted similar rules.

These new laws represent progress, but they can only do so much. And that's because these laws are focused on the design of new buildings. They don't address the thousands of glass structures that already exist. It's certainly much easier to design a bird-friendly building than to fix it later. Not that it's necessarily hard, it's just additional cost. Alexander Lang says there are only a few examples of buildings that have gone ahead with large-scale retrofits, including the Javits Center in Manhattan. It's a huge convention center that runs right along the West Side Highway next to a park.

Javits used to be a notorious bird killer, but a few years ago, the owners invested millions of dollars to replace all the glass in the building. The new glass is covered in tiny dots spaced two inches apart. NYC Audubon says the renovations at Javits have reduced bird collisions by about 90 percent, but that's just for one building. Like I talked to several architects who know all about bird safety and even they in dealing with some clients can't convince them to use bird safe glass.

There is such a prejudice on the part of clients, especially clients who are building luxury buildings to think that they need Florida's ceiling transparent glass. And they think that the people that are gonna buy apartments in these buildings are not gonna be satisfied with glass that has tiny little dots on it. So they say, no, we're not gonna put that in, like we could live with the bird deaths. But Alexander Lang says, despite the resistance

from designers, people get used to bird safe glass pretty quickly. It's really practically imperceptible to the human eye when you're inside the building that there are these teeny tiny dots on the glass. Even if there were laws to fix every skyscraper in America, it would only address a small part of the bird collision problem because our homes can have big glass windows too. And surprisingly, it's actually homes and low rise buildings that account for a majority

of bird collisions. Which begs the question, why are we talking about the high rises? Well, it's because a home or a low rise building is not going to kill 200 birds in one day. But there are so many more homes and low rise buildings in the U.S. than there are skyscrapers. So it's more the attrition of, say, your house with a big glass window killing 12 birds a year. But it turns out your neighbor's house also kills 12 birds a year, and the neighbor next to them and the neighbor next to them. The average person can't change the design of a skyscraper, but there are small fixes that can make your home bird safe.

If you say in your house have a big sliding glass door that birds keep running into, you can put stickers on that door. You can put a net over that door during prime flying season. At the very least, you should not install your bird feeder right in front of that giant glass door, because that makes it particularly deadly. So, yeah, there are a lot of inexpensive techniques that homeowners can use just to keep the birds away from their particular pain of glass. And that's what's so compelling about this issue, as opposed to the complex systemic interconnected issues that we often talk about on this show. Particlisions are a serious problem, but they pretty simple design solution.

The reason I love design is because design is about problem solving, and this is a problem we know how to solve. We just have to get over some of our aesthetic preoccupations in order to solve it. More words about birds with cur Colstad after this. So I'm back with 99PI's own Kurt Colstad to talk a little bit more about birds. Actually, there's quite a lot to talk about because over the years, we've gotten a lot of fan suggestions for stories on the subject of birds. Oh, yes, yes we have. And the funny thing is, back when I joined the show, like years ago, we actually had a rule on the books

about 90-I-PI covering animal-related stories. The Cardinal Rule. No Cardinals. Exactly. The Cardinal Rule was no Cardinals. And that also applied to other animals. It was just kind of a fun shorthand. But since then, we've talked about a lot of species,

especially in relationship to humans and our built environment. And we've gotten a lot of pitches from listeners about animals. For some reason, birds most of all. What is it about birds that gets people like suggesting stories for them? Yeah, I suspect it's partly because bird strikes are such a visible and kind of a traumatizing part of living in cities, and so naturally most of these stories that we do get involve

bird deaths and like how to mitigate bird deaths. But it turns out that not everyone is on board with saving birds or at least not every kind of bird. Wait, who's the anti bird out there? Right. What are these cruel people? Yeah. The anti bird. Wait, who's the anti-bird out there? Right. What are these cruel people? Yeah, the anti-bird. The birds are delightful.

Right, but it turns out that some birds are actively targeted for destruction. And here in the US, there's one in particular more than others, the Starling, which isn't even native to North America. Okay, so where do they come from if they're not from North America? So back in the late 1800s, there was a German immigrant named Eugene Sheflin and he was on this mission to introduce birds to North America, but not just any birds.

According to lore, he had a specific fondness for European species that had been written about by William Shakespeare. People who were introducing non-native birds, they really like to cite him as inspiration. Like he kind of jazzed people up about these birds. And so around the turn of the 20th century, there were a lot of groups that were aiming to make America look and feel more like Europe, in part by importing familiar plants and animals. And Eugene belonged to one of these groups. It was called the American Aclimatization Society. Huh. So would they just import birds and just release them out in the wild and just kind of hope

for the best? Yeah. Pretty much. And a lot of these foreign species failed to take off. But some of them, like the Starling, turned out to be really adept survivors. Because Starlings are highly competitive and they're really good at securing prime nesting spots that other birds would normally occupy. Yeah.

I mean, this is the story when it comes to introducing species. I mean, like, that sometimes they can sort of take over a niche and then they just crowd out all other birds. That's exactly it. And scientists have observed exactly that correlation that as starling populations increase, Bluebird would peck at other bird populations and decrease. Yeah. So I can see why birders would be kind of anti-starling, you know, because they're a fan

of other birds. Right. Right. They want some diversity, and they're not the only ones who are not totally on board with starlings, because it turns out starlings are also a really big pain for the agriculture industry. Not only do they eat grain that's meant for livestock, they're picky about it. They tend to eat the best grain.

And this has secondary effects, right? Like reducing the dairy output of cows. Yeah, I can see why farmers would be having a problem with starlings with that was the case. And on their behalf, the US Department of Agriculture has stepped in to mitigate this problem. The USD actually disperses or kills off millions of animals per year.

And from the latest numbers I've seen, starlings are at the top of their hit list. In 2021, they took out thousands of brown tree snakes, tens of thousands of feral pigs, but nearly a million starlings. Wow. That's significant. That's a lot. Yeah, and on top of the ones they kill, they disperse millions more each year. What does that mean?

That sounds like a euphemism. Well, yeah, for sure. For a great, well, basically, it's like they get them to move away from places that we don't want them, like farms. And they do this using a combination of, you know, recorded sounds and strobing lights, like anything that the birds would find scary

and, you know, wouldn't want to be your own. Huh. And so do those efforts actually work? Well, it's very much an uphill battle. Today there are still around 200 million starlings in North America. Viewed in that light, the USDA's impact seems actually kind of small. So we did a story a while back about how pigeons got introduced to North America. And now those are like the bird that most people think of as a new sense because we run across them in cities.

One of the things we talked about when we talked about pigeons is like, pigeons, it's all about attitude because they're called doves when they're not in cities. And so, I wonder, are there people who see those starlings and don't see them as pests? You don't just see them as like cool birds because they do those like murmurations where they fly through the sky. It's got there's kind of stunning to, you know, to watch. Are there people that are lobbying to protect them, even though they're invasive species?

I mean, not exactly like lobbying to protect them as such, but there are people who point out that starlings might not be as bad for other birds as we think. And so maybe our focus on killing starlings is kind of misplaced because there's a debate around the data. Regarding the impact they have on other bird species and this larger scientific question of correlation versus causation. And so there's a related school of thought

that maybe instead of running starlings out of town, we should build or grow more habitats for other birds, which makes sense. Right, right. Like we don't have to just kill off starlings. You know, we could just boost other birds and have a healthier ecosystem. Yeah, that's the idea.

But of course, farmers wouldn't be too thrilled about giving up the Starling Hunt, which leads me to another type of bird. One that farmers actually liked to have around owls. So I take it that farmers probably like owls because they eat rodents and things like that. Yeah, historically, yes. We like it when birds do things for us, but there are some groups that have taken to,

you know, building and putting up nesting boxes to help house species like displaced owls, which is independent of their utility to us humans. Yeah, that is nice to see that we shouldn't just treat animals as built environment suitable for us and for them. Because actually, in the end of it all, it needs to be suitable for both us and them for it to be a good, healthy, joyful place to live. Absolutely. And just one other thing before we go, there's a guy who wrote in from the US Fish and Wildlife Service. And he had some really interesting insights too. There are bricks that are specifically built to house certain kinds of birds. They're like, hello. And he also noted that like a lot of birds get stuck in pipes. I mean, there's just a top of the windows that we kind of talked about in the main part of the story. There are just a lot of techniques out there that we could employ to just make the built

environment like a happier place for all kinds of species. Yeah, yeah. This is one of those rare NINI PIs where the design solution is sitting right there. Like if you just have those frited glass, you could save so many bird lives. And the technology is there that just has to be the will and the willingness to spend the money to do it. But as windows get replaced, why not? Just like make everything just a little bit better

for birds, that would be amazing. Yeah, that's exactly it. And there are places in the world where it's like that's part of the mandate that cities have for new architecture, right? Like it's just like part and parcel of building a new building is just making it familiar for animals as well as humans. That's great. Well, thank you for that roundup, Kurt.

I mean, the Cardinal Rule was always a joke. I know, I know. I know. That we didn't do things about birds or any wildlife, but we clearly do things about wildlife all the time because it interacts with our cities and our built world so much that they're actually interesting design conundrums that come about when it comes to the interaction of humans and animals. And, you know, we have like a whole section in our book about it. It is a huge preoccupation of the people on the staff, like it is a huge preoccupation

of the people on the staff. So it's a favorite topic of mine, too. Like I love animals and I love the built environment, so I love places where they intersect. Yeah, that's awesome. Well, thanks so much for this little extra information, Kurt, I appreciate it. Of course.

99% of us, what was produced this week by Alexander Lang with Chris Baroube, Keko Donald and Kurt Colstead, editing by Delaney Hall, mixed in tech production by Martin Gonzales, music by our director of sound Swan Riau. The Resideme includes Vivian Leigh, Christopher Johnson, Lashemba Dawn, Jason Dillion, Joe Rosenberg, Emmett Fitzgerald, Sophia Klatsker, and me Roman Mars. Alexander Lang first wrote about bird safe design for Bloomberg City Lab. We'll include a link to this article and more of Alexandra's writing at 99pi.org. Special thanks this week to Elizabeth Shapiro, Dan Pazelli, Garrett Crow, NYC Audemont,

FLAB Canada, and our birders Jera Thorpe, and Catherine Cuell. We are part of the Stitcher and Series XM Podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building, in beautiful, uptown, Oakland, California. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tune me at Roman Mars

and the show at 99PI org, or on Instagram and Reddit too. You can find links to other Stitcher shows I love as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99PI.org. I can't make serious accents, I'm so like a bird. Serious accents.