The House Always Wins

“What was that noise?”

It was 6am. And a sound similar to a loud gunshot reverberated in the air. It turns out that the sound originated from an impact collision. A ruffled grouse flew at a high rate of speed directly into one of the front windows of the house. The impact killed the bird.

He was prone on the front entrance of our home. A beautiful bird and I felt very badly that it was dead.

Bird-window crashes are unfortunately quite common. I have read estimates that suggest up to one billion birds are killed each year in the United States. Yes. One billion.

The bird strike at our home is not the first one. There were several last year. Always on the same window. I suspect that the reflection of the trees gets painted on this particular window and it fools the bird into thinking that there is open space. If there are continued bird strikes on the window, I may need to consider putting some form of covering to reduce the reflection.

4 replies
  1. Matthew Cleaver
    Matthew Cleaver says:

    I think we need to do that. Once I heard a bird hit my window. I look out and the bird is on the ground, still alive. However, he was dying and I saw him die. It was very sad to see that.

    Reply
  2. Mike P
    Mike P says:

    It’s frustrating that there doesn’t seem to be a really good solid solution for this problem. Given that birds can see well into the ultraviolet range, you’d thing there’d be some kind of film or something you could apply that would be mostly transparent to visible light, but opaque to birds. None of the officially-sanctioned options are very attractive.

    My mom volunteered with FLAP for a little bit last summer, but I don’t think she found it a helpful experience””they seemed to be more focused on picking birds that were already dead, rather than taking steps to save the ones that have not yet had a collision.

    Reply

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