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Volunteers Help Study The Safety Of Birds
As the two slowly circle the World Financial Center, with Trezza often pushing her daughter Khadeejah in a stroller, they keep an eye out for dead, stunned or injured birds that have flown into the building’s glass walls. “I just found this one this morning,” Quinones said on her rounds one morning last month, reaching into her purse and pulling out a large, stiff wood thrush from a plastic bag. “It’s almost all migratory birds passing through New York on their way somewhere else,” Trezza said. “The city birds, the pigeons and sparrows, they don’t run into the glass.” Trezza is one of several volunteers who patrol the World Financial Center as part of the New York Audubon Society’s Project Safe Flight. Founded in 1997, the conservation project both rescues birds injured in collisions with buildings and gathers data on bird collisions. The World Financial Center is one of six places in New York that the Audubon Society is focusing on as “kill zones,” buildings where a combination of factors lead to a high number of bird collisions. The Audubon Society says it is a combination of location, glass type, and the proximity of vegetation either inside the glass or reflected from a nearby park, that turn glass buildings into hazards. Nicole Delecrétaz, who oversees the project for Audubon, says understanding why some birds hit some buildings more often than others is an important step in preserving migratory bird species. Delecrétaz estimates that a billion birds a year are killed this way, making it the second leading threat to migratory birds after habitat destruction.
Assembling the information about which birds tend to hit where and when is just the beginning, though. “Then you try to make the change,” Delecrétaz said. The deadliest building for birds used to be the Postal Service Mail Processing Facility on West 28th Street. Each migration season, anywhere from 100 to 300 birds were killed on its glass. When Project Safe Flight brought the Postal Service the data they had collected on the building and a list of recommendations for reducing its impact, postal officials agreed to cover windows not being used for illumination with matte black vinyl. Bird collisions at the building dropped to zero. Delecrétaz concedes that most buildings’ windows can’t be blacked out, but there are alternatives: lightweight netting, glass etched to make its surface more evident, and, because birds perceive a part of the ultraviolet spectrum that humans cannot, films with ultraviolet patterns that people inside won’t see. Delecrétaz said the key to the campaign is the roughly 30 volunteers in Manhattan who gather the information. “It all starts with the data, with the volunteers on the ground,” Delecrétaz said. “Every aspect of this project is made possible by them waking up early to go looking for birds.” [Home][Back][Search][Contact] The Tribeca Trib · 401 Broadway, 5th Floor · New York, NY · 10013 · 212.219.9709 |
