From bus shelters to radars, a DASNR researcher and his team work to keep birds safer indows provide a source of natural light in man-made structures. They also allow for unique and beautiful architecture, but windows can be fatal to birds. At Oklahoma State University, researchers are working to predict and prevent bird-window collisions, which are one of the biggest threats for migrating birds. As lead researcher, Scott Loss, associate professor in natural resource ecology and management, has focused his team’s efforts toward reducing these collisions. “Relatively few researchers are working on bird-window collisions today especially in comparison to other threats like wind energy, communication towers and structures that cause collisions,” Loss said. “Windows are the No. 1 collision threat, causing up to a billion bird fatalities in the U.S. a year.” Part of the reason for the collisions is the difference in eye structure between birds and humans, Loss said. “In our eyes, we have only one kind of rod and a couple of kinds of cones,” Loss said. “Birds have an extra type of cone in their eyes, and in many species it’s sensitive to the UV spectrum. “They’re actually seeing in a way we can’t understand or envision,” he added. To reduce the rate of bird collisions, windows simply need to be more visible to birds, Loss said. Incorporating how a 46 | COWBOY JOURNAL
bird sees into building design would be a more effective strategy than focusing only on how humans see, he added. “Ultimately, if you have that understanding of how birds see a building, then you could tweak the building in ways to help the birds see the windows,” Loss said. Adding a visual barrier to the window is one way to accomplish this, Loss said. Georgia Riggs, NREM master’s student, uses the bus shelters at OSU to test one type of visual barrier. “A grid of individual markers is placed on a sheet pane of glass,” Riggs said. “The markers break the reflectivity and transparency of the glass, so birds can detect it as a barrier.” The markers are developed by the company, Feather Friendly, Riggs said. They are round, white dots placed in a grid pattern. “There was a baseline study done here in Stillwater in 2016 looking at the bus shelters to see how many birds collide with shelters,” Riggs said. “It found that a lot of birds were colliding with these glass-walled bus shelters.” Riggs used this data to decide which shelters to treat. She had the grid applied In her research that may help minimize bird-window collisions, Georgia Riggs uses a grid of dots on OSU bus stops. Photo by Harrison Hill.
