Murder Most Fowl

Roman Mars:
This is 99% Invisible. I’m Roman Mars.

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 – humans and birds both *love* to play tourist in New York City. Every year, millions of birds fly through 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.

Alexandra Lange:
I live really near Brooklyn Bridge Park and I 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 never really perceived it as a bird habitat.

Roman Mars:
This is design critic and friend of the show Alexandra Lange.

Alexandra Lange:
I would see people, you know, tweeting pictures of birds from Brooklyn Bridge 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.

Roman Mars:
Alexandra wanted to know more about the birds passing through her city, and wrote an article about it, for the website CityLab. Last November, she emailed two local birders. And they showed her all the birds quietly nesting in her favorite park.

Jer Thorp:
And then we have the ravens’ nest, did you hear about that? So the ravens nested on the tower of the Brooklyn Bridge. And that’s the third ever on record ravens…

Alexandra Lange:
They showed me this bird that they called the butter butt.

Catherine Quayle:
So people call them butter butts.

Roman Mars:
Its real name is the yellow rump warbler, just FYI. I don’t know if that’s any more dignified than butter butt, but, you know…

Alexandra Lange:
And it’s just so fun to see just that 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.

Roman Mars:
But as Alexandra walked through 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-ceiling windows. These all-glass building facades are the absolute worst for migrating birds. Because unlike people, birds don’t really understand glass.

[MUSIC]

Alexandra Lange:
I mean, this is happening in cities all over the U.S. 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.

Kaitlyn Parkins:
Any time you have glass and birds in the same space, you have a risk of bird/window collisions.

Roman Mars:
This is Kaitlyn Parkins, the interim director of conservation and science at New York City Audubon.

Kaitlyn Parkins:
I often hear people say, “Oh, birds are so dumb, 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 we can look through our window and see 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.”

Roman Mars:
Birds can’t pick up on those cues. This is especially bad if there’s anything behind the glass the bird recognizes, like a plant.

Kaitlyn Parkins:
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, when we put vegetation behind glass. We love atriums 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.

Roman Mars:
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 birdsong is just really nice. We don’t have exact numbers for how many birds we kill because there’s no bird census. But even the lowest estimates are devastating.

Alexandra Lange:
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, I noticed, when I was looking back through the stats, very broad estimates, but it’s a lot of birds.

Roman Mars:
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 organize volunteers to document the number of dead birds next to skyscrapers. Here’s Kaitlyn Parkins.

Kaitlyn Parkins:
It started back in 1997, when one of our board members started just noticing dead birds on the sidewalk and didn’t know what was actually 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.

Roman Mars:
If you want to see this in action, there’s a video on YouTube of Kaitlyn helping stunned birds in a New York City park.

[AUDIO FROM YOUTUBE: STUNNED BIRDS]
Kaitlyn Parkins: Let the bird out and let it choose to leave when it wants to. So I’m just going to open this bag. (sound of wings flapping) This bird is ready, ready to go. Go ahead. There you go.

Kaitlyn Parkins:
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.

[MUSIC]

Roman Mars:
According to Kaitlyn, stunned and wounded birds are the exception. Most birds that collide with buildings are killed instantly. The audubon volunteers spend a lot of their time picking up dead birds and bringing them back to a freezer at their office in Manhattan.

Kaitlyn Parkins:
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.

Roman Mars:
Still, these collision walks are really difficult for the volunteers and staff at NYC Audubon. Kaitlyn Parkins vividly remembers a day last fall that lives in New York birder infamy. October 6th, 2021.

Kaitlyn Parkins:
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. Volunteers are 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 blackpoll 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.

[MUSIC]

Roman Mars:
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 Enemy Number One” because of its design. The tower is basically a floor length mirror of a building, and it’s in exactly the wrong place.

Alexandra Lange:
The other aspect of why that particular site is deadly is the Memorial Grove of trees around the footprint fountains for the deaths on 911. Those are a very broad tree canopy that’s right in close proximity to these buildings.

Roman Mars:
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.

Alexandra Lange:
She went to the World Trade Center site and she found over 200 dead birds there that day. And she actually arranged them in kind of a grid and attached the photos to the tweet. And I really think it went viral because seeing, you know, that many like tiny, fragile dead birds, all in one tweet was just very overwhelming.

Kaitlyn Parkins:
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.

Alexandra Lange:
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, you know, to do this to birds?

[MUSIC]

Roman Mars:
When it comes to bird collisions, there’s a lot we can do. For nighttime collisions, we can turn off lights in empty skyscrapers which are tempting for 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, so a bird doesn’t see the glass as transparent. According to Alexandra Lange, there are many great examples of bird-safe design on the New York skyline.

Alexandra Lange:
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.

[MUSIC]

Roman Mars:
Today, many architects are consulting birders 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.

Alexandra Lange:
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.

Roman Mars:
Amazon hired a landscape architect named Kate Orff to work on the project, and right away, she noticed the serious problems with the facade.

Alexandra Lange:
Kate Orff is a birder, is somebody that’s been a real activist on bird safety, helped to write some early, earlier guidelines with the 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.”

Roman Mars:
Say what you will about Amazon as a company but they listened to Kate Orff and the birders on this one.

Alexandra Lange:
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.

[MUSIC]

Roman Mars:
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 glass 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. 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.

Kaitlyn Parkins:
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.

Roman Mars:
Alexandra Lange 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%. But that’s just for one building.

Alexandra Lange:
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’s such a prejudice on the part of clients, especially clients who are building luxury buildings, to think that they need floor to ceiling transparent glass. And they think that the people that are going to buy apartments in these buildings are not going to be satisfied with glass that has tiny little dots on it. So they say “No, we’re not going to put that in, we could live with the bird deaths.”

Roman Mars:
But Alexandra Lange says, despite the resistance from designers, people used to bird-safe glass get pretty quickly.

Alexandra Lange:
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.

[MUSIC OUT]

Roman Mars:
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.

Alexandra Lange:
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.

Roman Mars:
The average person can’t change the design of a skyscraper, but there are small fixes that can make your home bird-safe.

Alexandra Lange:
If you, say in your house, you 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 pane of glass.

Roman Mars:
And that’s what is so compelling about this issue as opposed to the complex, systemic, interconnected issues that we often talk about on this show. Bird collisions are a serious problem with a pretty simple design solution.

Alexandra Lange:
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.

Roman Mars:
More words about birds with Kurt Kohlstedt, after this.

[BREAK]

Roman Mars:
So I’m back with 99PI’s own Kurt Kohlstedt 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.

Kurt Kohlstedt:
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 99PI covering animal-related stories.

Roman Mars:
The cardinal rule: No cardinals.

Kurt Kohlstedt:
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, you know, humans and our built environment. And we’ve gotten a lot of pitches from listeners about animals. For some reason, birds, most of all.

Roman Mars:
What is it about birds that gets people like suggesting stories for us?

Kurt Kohlstedt:
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.

Roman Mars:
Wait! Who’s anti-bird out there? Who are these cruel people? How can you be anti-bird? Birds are delightful!

Kurt Kohlstedt:
Right? But it turns out that some birds are actively targeted for destruction, and here in the U.S., there’s one in particular more than others. The starling, which isn’t even native to North America.

Roman Mars:
Okay, so where do they come from if they’re not from North America?

Kurt Kohlstedt:
So back in the late eighteen hundreds, there was a German immigrant named Eugene Schieffelin, 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 Acclimatization Society.

Roman Mars:
So they just import birds and just release them out in the wild and just kind of hope for the best.

Kurt Kohlstedt:
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.

Roman Mars:
Yeah, I mean, this is the story when it comes to introducing species, I mean, like… but sometimes they can sort of take over a niche and they just crowd out all other birds.

Kurt Kohlstedt:
That’s exactly it. And scientists have observed exactly that correlation that as starling populations increase, bluebird woodpecker and other bird populations decrease.

Roman Mars:
Yeah. So I can see why birders would be kind of anti-starling, you know, because they’re a fan of other birds.

Kurt Kohlstedt:
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.

Roman Mars:
Yeah, I can see why farmers would be– have a problem with starlings if that was the case.

Kurt Kohlstedt:
And on their behalf, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has stepped in to mitigate this problem. The USDA 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.

Roman Mars:
Wow, that’s significant. That’s a lot.

Kurt Kohlstedt:
Yeah. And on top of the ones they kill, they dispersed billions more each year.

Roman Mars:
What does that mean? That sounds like a euphemism.

Kurt Kohlstedt:
Well, yeah. 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 around.

Roman Mars:
And so do those efforts actually work?

Kurt Kohlstedt:
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.

Roman Mars:
So we did a story a while back about how pigeons got introduced to North America. And, you know, now those are like the bird that most people think of as a nuisance, 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 the city. And so I wonder, are there people who, you know, see those starlings and don’t see them as pests, you know, just see them as cool birds because they do those like murmurations where they float through the sky. And they’re kind of stunning to watch. Are there people that are lobbying to protect them even though there are invasive species?

Kurt Kohlstedt:
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, you know, killing starlings is kind of misplaced because there’s a debate around the data, right? Regarding the impact they have on other bird species and this, you know, larger scientific question of correlation versus causation.

Roman Mars:
Right.

Kurt Kohlstedt:
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 you know, makes sense.

Roman Mars:
Right. Like, we don’t have to just kill off starlings, you know, we could just boost other birds and have a healthier ecosystem.

Kurt Kohlstedt:
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 like to have around — owls.

Roman Mars:
So I take it that farmers probably like owls because they eat rodents and things like that.

Kurt Kohlstedt:
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 you know is independent of their utility to us humans.

Roman Mars:
Yeah, that is nice to see that we should just treat animals as, you know, valuable because they serve us in some ways. So it’s nice that we are making the built environment suitable for us and for them. Cause actually in the end of it all, like it needs to be suitable for both us and them for it to be a good, healthy, like, joyful place to live.

Kurt Kohlstedt:
Absolutely. And you know, 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, like there are bricks that are specifically built to house certain kinds of birds that are, like hollow. And he also noted that, like a lot of birds, get stuck in pipes and there’s just – on 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 a happier place for all kinds of species.

Roman Mars:
Yeah, yeah. This is one of those rare 99PI’s where the design solution is sitting right there. You know, like if you just have those fritted glass, you could save so many bird lives and it’s… the technology is there, there just has to be the will. And you know, the willingness to like, spend the money to do it. But you know, as windows get replaced, why not just make everything just a little bit better for birds. That would be amazing.

Kurt Kohlstedt:
That’s exactly it. And there are places in the world where that’s part of the mandate that cities have for new architecture. It’s just like part and parcel of building a new building is just making it friendlier for animals as well as humans.

Roman Mars:
That’s great. Well, thank you for that roundup, Kurt. I mean, the cardinal rule was always a joke.

Kurt Kohlstedt:
I know, I know.

Roman Mars:
–that we didn’t, you know, 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.

Kurt Kohlstedt:
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.

Roman Mars:
Yeah, that’s awesome. Well, thanks so much for this little extra information, Kurt. Appreciate it.

Kurt Kohlstedt:
Of course.

——————

CREDITS

Roman Mars:
99% Invisible was produced this week by Alexandra Lange with Chris Berube, Kayko Donald and Kurt Kohlstedt. Editing by Delaney Hall. Mixi and tech production by Martín Gonzalas. Music by our director of sound Swan Real. The rest of the team includes Vivian Le, Christopher Johnson, Lasha Madan, Jayson De Leon, Joe Rosenberg, Emmett FitzGerald, Sofia Klatzker and me, Roman Mars.

Alexandra Lange first wrote about bird-safe design for Bloomberg CityLab. We’ll include a link to the article, and more of Alexandra’s writing, at 99pi.org. Special thanks this week to Elisabeth Shapiro, Dan Piselli, Garrett Crowe, NYC Audubon, FLAP Canada, and our birders, Jer Thorp and Catherine Quayle.

We are part of the Stitcher and SiriusXM 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 tweet at me @RomanMars and the show @99piorg. We’re 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.