How Colleges Are Sparing Birds’ Lives and Conserving Energy

Aaron Williams was never a bird expert or even a bird enthusiast. But somehow, he’s found himself coordinating a flock of volunteers at the University of Wisconsin at Madison as part of a large-scale effort to protect local and migrating birds.

“I purely stumbled into it,” Williams said, as the university’s assistant campus planner and zoning coordinator. Williams knew of some research that had been done in the 1980s, and he knew that bird-strike was a growing concern in the architecture field. Then he heard more about the issue from nearby neighborhood associations like the Madison Audubon Society. “How can we continue to have these inanimate objects that we construct, and knowingly do this to something that’s living?” he said. “It just seems kind of wrong.”

Birds cannot perceive transparent glass as a solid surface, according to the American Bird Conservancy. They see reflections of the sky and interpret a clear path, leading them to smash into the glass. There are up to a billion bird collisions in the United States every year.

Williams started in 2017 by arranging a symposium, to hear from the Madison Audubon Society, a wildlife researcher on campus, and architects from the New York firm Ennead. Williams said about 50 people attended.

Colleges and universities have long been leaders in sustainability and environmentally conscious habits. As early as 2015, several institutions announced that they would make their glass buildings more bird-friendly, including Northwestern University, the University of New England, and the University of Pennsylvania.

“It’s not unusual that academics are on the cutting edge,” said Christine Sheppard, director of the glass collisions campaign at the American Bird Conservancy. Sheppard said that she has been working for years to connect colleges and universities interested in updating their designs so no one has to start from scratch.

Sheppard said that institutions have incorporated a number of strategies, including glass replacements with colors or patterns, decals, and other methods to make windows more opaque. The strategies differ depending on the specific building and location, as many universities are located on major migratory paths. Some of the strategies have the added benefit, Sheppard said, of making the building more energy-efficient.

A Student Petition

Student activism also plays a role in solving the problem. “There’s often a lot of resistance to doing something to fix a building,” Sheppard said. “But you can’t fire students.”

At the University of New England, the construction of a new glass building was altered significantly after a student’s petition was circulated.

Noah Perlut, an associate professor of environmental studies at New England, was teaching a course in “Avian Ecology and Conservation” in the fall of 2016. Two mornings a week his students would spend class time catching birds and examining them. The class also watched a documentary film, The Messenger, about preventing bird-strike.

Perlut said it was, “eye-opening to have that experience, to handle birds and to see how diverse they are and how fragile they are. It really changes your appreciation for these animals.”

Later that semester, when plans for the Danielle N. Ripich Commons Building — named for the university president — were made public, Perlut said his students were immediately concerned by the three stories of glass windows facing a lake frequented by birds. They wrote a petition and gathered more than 1,000 signatures, including some from the local Audubon chapter and a company that sells birding equipment, and presented it to Ripich.

Ripich received with their argument, and despite the added expenses of updating the building design, agreed.

Most of the students from that class have graduated by now, Perlut said, and are pursuing a variety of professional paths. They aren’t all professional ornithologists, but that is what is so remarkable. They were just students and they made a difference to a “focal point” on campus, he said.

“I’m proud of the whole system,” Perlut said. “Proud of the students, their passion transforming into this success of really shaping the center of our campus.”

In cases like New England’s, Perlut said, it’s important for institutions to think about the long-term, real-world lessons they send with students, beyond the classroom.

“Especially from a university standpoint, showing leadership in how we can live sustainably and work sustainably is such a critical role that we as educators have.”

Leading by Example

Chloe Cerwinka, a landscape planner at the University of Pennsylvania, said it was important for Penn to lead by example in the movement, especially considering its location within an urban landscape, Philadelphia. Her biggest challenge, she said, was explaining the initiative to others.

“People seem really surprised that there are so many bird strikes throughout the city,” Cerwinka said. “I think people don’t really quite believe that it’s a real issue.”

Penn began retrofitting buildings after a student at the time, Joe Durrance, started collecting information for his capstone project. Durrance worked with facilities employees to apply a film to the glass walls of the School of Veterinary Medicine and the Penn medical school’s Robert Wood Johnson Pavilion.

Since the effort picked up in 2015, Cerwinka said Penn is planning to retrofit two more buildings on campus and incorporating bird-friendly designs into new constructions.

“It’s an issue across the country, so everyone kind of needs to come together and do what they can in the space that they have control over,” Cerwinka said.

UW-Madison joined the movement more than two years ago, but Williams said the university is only in the fact-finding stage. The preparatory work for actually making changes is much more “nuanced” than many would think, he said.

Most recently, his task force completed its first 45-day monitoring study in the spring semester. With the help of around 30 volunteers, at least a third of whom were students, the university collected and recorded finding dead birds around 12 different buildings on campus - with the goal, Williams said, of identifying the worst offenders.

To collect the data, there are many “hoops of risk management” to jump through, Williams said. He’s had to coordinate with the university’s health and human services departments to train volunteers to handle the birds safely, and with the facilities managers for each building being monitored.

Now that the study is done, it’s a matter of “funding and willpower” to bring changes. Details for the timing haven’t taken flight yet.

Follow Teghan Simonton on Twitter at @teghan_simonton, or email her at teghan.simonton@chronicle.com.

Correction (8/9/2018, 1:35 p.m.): The credit for the photo on this article should go to Holly Hayood, not Sarah Delage. The text has been corrected.