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Birds routinely crash into high rise buildings with large reflective windows.
Use decorative window tints of eagles and other realistic renditions of birds of prey on multiple windows to scare them away.
Imagine the side of a highrise looking like a jungle scape
Not like this -- scary ones
http://www.usa-web.com/utz/gallery.htm
[theircompetitor, Oct 04 2004]
Like this ?
http://www.acorn-on...irdnote/bird510.htm
[skinflaps, Oct 04 2004]
Just add batteries
http://www.ruinsbruins.com/eagle.jpg
[skinflaps, Oct 04 2004]
Bird of prey silhouettes
http://www.nabu.de/.../vogelschutz/14.jpg
Apparently they don't actually help much [squeak, Oct 04 2004]
[squeak] - I think you're lying
http://uk.multimap....iewmap=&scale=50000
The closest I could find was Burger, Wackersburg [PeterSilly, Oct 04 2004]
Klingon Bird Of Prey
http://www.ex-astri....org/scans/bop1.htm
[theircompetitor, Oct 04 2004]
the eyes have it
http://www.pest-bir.../BX-terroreyes.html
[FarmerJohn, Oct 04 2004]
as described here!
http://news.bbc.co....ci/tech/3505256.stm
[po, Oct 04 2004]
Intelligent Crow
http://www.newscien...s.jsp?id=ns99992651
It uses and adapts tools. [saker, Oct 04 2004]
Intelligent Harris Hawks
http://www.wolfruns...PAGES/pg_brd07.html
Cooperate in hunting. Velocoraptors, anyone? [saker, Oct 04 2004]
Sentient Sheep
http://www.findarti...20/p1/article.jhtml
Sheep Don't Forget a Face [saker, Oct 04 2004]
BTO Article on Bird Window collisions.
http://www.bto.org/...e/windowstrikes.htm
[DrBob, Oct 04 2004]
Window Alert
http://www.boingboi...2/window-alert.html
[jaksplat, Mar 04 2011]
[link]
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I dont know what to say. So I'll just keep quiet and think about what to give you. |
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I say we let Darwin do his work, and weed out the birds that can't figure out what a mirror is. |
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skinflaps, are you talking about the sexually conflicted guys in prison on HBO, or Dorothy? |
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Link is ok for residential, but of course not for a high rise. |
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A friends house in Queensland. |
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they already do this, in my area we have plastic owls, to keep small birds away. It also works for mice. |
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and Yes, Owls are birds of prey even if they don't look cool. |
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I think I'm somehow not being clear. I'm talking about using decorative window tints, of the type that you may have on a rear car window -- i.e. transparent but visible -- and having them on a large number of windows in a high rise. |
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You cannot reallistically have a plastic toy next to, or outside, a large number of windows in a 50 or more story buidling |
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It is an excellent idea, but, sadly, baked to buggery here in Germany. Black silhouettes of various birds of prey are stuck to glass bus stops and windows all over the place. I'll look for a link. |
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//baked to buggery here in Germany// - is that in Bavaria? |
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Dem poor dumb birds will hit a bus stop on the ground much less the airy reaches of a skyscrape. Put a do not enter sign on all plate glass. |
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[PeterSilly] Sure is. How did you guess? |
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Oh, see linky for bird stickers. |
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I vote for this as long as the birds of prey are also visible on the inside. If you must work in a cubicle at least you should have 20 eagles glaring at you. |
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If you make things look like birds of prey that don't swoop out of the sky and attack, you may do more harm than good by making the birds less afraid. |
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I also think [DC] is at least a little bit right. Over time we want to make sure that birds are just as afraid of glass, mirrored windows, and vehicles as they are of larger birds. |
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<points to the sky> Look! It's [hob]! </pts> |
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How about american kestrals, eagles, falcons, and vultures all glaring at you while you're in the cubical, you could figure out which ones resemble your co-workers and bosses. ; ) |
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They found that putting plastic orange "worms" on powerlines and stopped birds flying into them. [looks for link] |
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I see this idea in kids' nature magazines all the time, "put hawk cutouts on your picture window so the sparrows don't knock themselves silly" Also, enlighten me on the 'birds-of-prey/Klingon' connection |
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Hey, Owls ARE cool. Name another fluffy heartless killer. |
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spacecadet -- you must be fresh in the academy :) |
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[FarmerJohn] I was most interested in your link because I have a related problem with thousands of raven-sized crows wintering in the mature ash trees surrounding my house. Nothing legal seems to work to diminish their messy and cacophonous residency. I gave your "eyes have it" solution [link] several minutes of serious consideration before deciding that multiple 2-foot diameter orange balls hanging in the trees would look like very strange fruit indeed to passersby. ...Oh, but perhaps that was the less than subtle point. |
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Regarding po's link. I just don't believe those headline figures. If the estimate of 100million collisions a year is correct then that's 190 bird collisions per second. I'm over forty years old now (difficult to believe when you see me) and I've never ever seen or heard one. And after a quick straw poll I've discovered that between the five of us currently in the office, we've only ever heard one collision and seen two in getting on for a combined total of two hundred years. So my scientifically arrived at conclusion is that this story is total bollocks and that it's yet another case of someone overdramatising the situation in order to raise finance to keep themselves employed. |
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DrBob -- it may be skewed, though there are guys who regularly clean them up by the large glass dome of the World Financial Center |
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Maybe, but between us we've got a hundred years of experience of working in large, many windowed offices.
The telling bit of the article for me is the statement that "The BTO acknowledges these are tentative figures extrapolated from a small number of records" which I take to mean that it's a totally unrealistic extrapolation based on the flimsiest of evidence. |
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like DB, I have never personally seen anything like this whatsoever - but I have seen birds that have managed to find their way *into* a building struggle to get out!many is the daft budgy I have owned in my time that has thrown itself against the window in an attempt to get out. |
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I've seen two in the last 10 years, and heard another one break the glass in my daughter's bedroom window in the last 3. They do seem to be mainly young birds - "Hey, Mum, look at me, I'm flying, I'm fly..." I guess if you live in a Brighton basement, you ain't likely to see much :) |
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But then birds are daft. A bit like sheep of the air really. Except they don't have woolly coats. |
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Croissant, purely for length of title. |
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// But then birds are daft // |
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Uh, no. And neither are sheep. Lots of animals exhibit behaviour that, subjectively, is more intelligent than a lot of people I know, now that I think about it. <links> |
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I bet you either you, or someone you know, has walked into a glass door at some point. |
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[saker] - at no point did I indicate that people weren't daft! And as for walking into things, heck, my grandmother walked straight into a lamppost once, and she was looking where she was going. It took a long time for my brother and I to stop laughing, which was even sadder because she had really hurt herself. |
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Went into a shop recently that had glass doors, but they were held open when I entered. As I left, I neglected to check that they were still being held open, which of course they weren't, and, being in a bit of a rush, clanged right into them. Nearly broke my specs. The shop was really busy, I felt like a complete arse. Hey, there's an idea - window tints of a large pair of buttocks on glass doors... |
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Good work tsuka, and I take your point about the BBC article but I still don't buy it. If you check out the article on the BTO's own website they start by talking about 'occasional' incidents and then follow that up with this estimated figure of 100 million. A bit further on they say that this is based on 11,000 reports on ringed birds, half of which have been found dead. All sounds reasonable enough so far.
However, at this point things start to smell of fish. Having used the numbers above to make it sound like a reasonable scientific sample they then qualify things by saying "where the cause of death is known" (i.e. a sub-set of the above numbers of unquantified size)and start to use percentages instead of numbers. It's a favourite device for overdramatising results. So, if they've got three dead blackbirds and one of them died from hitting a window, they've extrapolated that up to say that 33% of all blackbird deaths are caused by window collisions. It's patently rubbish, otherwise we'd all be knee deep in dead birds. As that's not the case then either there are a few 'hotspots' where teams of labourers are continuosly employed in excavating buildings from the ever growing mountain of bird corpses or the BTO are deliberately over-dramatising things in order to get a bit of publicity and attract funding. |
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You should come over here [DrBob] and help us shovel out a few crateloads of dead sparrows that appeared this morning. Same every bloomin' day. |
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Maby you could hit the dead birds with a massive amount of radiation and sell them to rich people... |
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Maybe too futuristic, but how about HOLOGRAPHIC birds of prey that seem to soar 10 feet out from the windows of tall buildings? This way you don't cover up your window view with paper, and it's more realistic and scary to the oncoming songbird. |
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weirdly enough, I have had 2 birds crash into the window of this room, this summer. the first was a big bird (possibly a seagull) that took the crash full on the nose and how he did not break the glass is beyond me; the second seemed to apply the brakes just before impact and bounced away with a squeal and a rush of feathers (frightened the life out of me on both occasions)- I can only imagine that it has to do with the fact that I have repositioned a monitor which is now 90 degrees askew of the window & at the same height - I am supposing it has something to do with reflections. |
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[po] - If one does "kick the bucket", you would then be in a position to try "French Fried Seagull". |
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Recently we've had a small bird repeatedly tapping at our windows and it there's no-one in the room it starts in, it moves around the house to find an occupied one. |
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meanie, let your budgie in. |
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when I told no 1 son about these incidents, he told me about a friend who picked up a hitchhiking crow through the windscreen half way up the motorway. dead bird on passenger seat and driver covered in bird blood. |
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hope its not an urban myth. well, I do actually... |
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We had a white-throated sparrow once, tapping at the window pane of the side window of the basement. I decided he was probably hungry, since I had read about this behavior before! I went around and put some mixed bird seeds near him, and the tapping stopped & he ate happily. |
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This is very baked. The Toronto science museum has this going on, actually. |
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I like the idea of bird of prey tints on my sunglasses. Because I really don't want some beer-addled flamingo crashing into my face. |
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On my drinking glasses too; maybe that would keep the flamingos away in the first place. |
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I guesstimate 3 birds a month die from flying into the windows at
my office. It's a 3 storey building. |
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It's distressing, walking out for a relaxing, stress reducing break
to have to see a bird there dying after bouncing off the window. |
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They scare the living hell out of me when they hit the window in
my office as well. |
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