#warblers

Last week Audubon reported hundreds of dead and dying songbirds who had struck buildings in NYC. Looking at the pictures makes my heart hurt. Unfortunately, this isn’t a rare event–window strikes of all kinds are thought to kill up to a billion birds a year (Loss, 2014) all over the country. NYC has a lot of windows, a lot of lights, and is smack in the path of the Atlantic Flyway–and so every migration birds get disoriented and die from striking windows that look (to them) like just more sky.

These facts about birds and buildings are why we included window strikes in NYC in the first few pages of Winged Heroes. Mya and I wanted this book to be a fun read (and it is!), but it was important to us to confront real issues that birds face in today’s world. In this scene, I took care to depict the real species (a LOT of warblers) that die needlessly every year from these events.

Real birds do not have Avian Superheroes there to redirect their flight paths away from danger–so it is up to us humans to help mitigate window strikes, as individuals and as organizations. Treating windows to make them more apparent to birds (many, many ways to do this!) and turning off lights at night are ways to minimize window strikes–and if you are planning a building, taking the possibility of strikes into account when designing windows.
For more information, check out both Audubon’s and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s resources on window strikes.

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