A couple of months ago , a friend of mine said,"come & see this". It was a perfect imprint on an upstairs window, of a bird that had flown headlong, fullbore, straight into the glass.
A few weeks later i was laying a patio for another friend (Matt), when he says ,"look at this". it was a perfect imprint of a pigeon (feathers n all), on his patio door.
Today, i went down to a customers home, where i was laying a patio (weather permitting) & found a dead pigeon on the floor. Up above, on the kitchen window, was an imprint of the pigeon, where it had impacted.
I"m gettin spooked about this !
I build nice patios, but feel i"m decreasing the bird population.
I"d never seen this until this year.
Is something weird happening to birds navigation systems ?
They all flew straight into glass, but, it was just normal windows /patio doors. Surely they could of seen the HOUSE & flown over it ?

As far as birds flying into windows ,i,ve heard of that happening many times especially if the windows are really clean the birds think it,s an opening they can fly through But the crash landings on roofs and patios is new to me! I don,t know what that could mean.

Theres this one bird I think its a pee wee that flies into my window next to the computer all the time. And its the same one. He gets stunned and sometimes falls to the ground and gets back up. Its scared the bejesus out of me a few times.
Its probably just a coincidence that it keeps happening to your patios or could it be the season or something?

This happens all the time to me. No worries.

*Edit: I didn't mean that I fly into windows all the time. Birds around my house do. Geez.*

Bird's fly into windows quite often because of their transparency I suppose the bird assumes there is nothing there.

alot of the time they see their own reflection get confused fly towards and crash.

But they could be getting put off by something else who knows

Once a bird kept crashing into the bus i was on when going to work. It just flew into the window went away and came back smack into the window did it about 5 times before the bus finally left the bus stop

birds do fly into glass and they often do it when they've been frightened, but they also do it because they just can't see that it's glass.

There's a thread in the natural world section of UM where we've been discussing homing pigeons and how their navigation could possibly be affected by electro-magnetic environmental factors like thunder and lightning storms and possibly solar flares.

Yup.

About two - three birds have flown into my parents sliding glass door. Each time, my dad has been there on the couch. To hear the noise of the bird. XD We both think it's so funny.

If the birds are crashing into non-transparent buildings and walls then their may be something wrong. Don't birds use like the earth's magnetic field or something to as like a guidance system to fly?

I've seen this at my parents house. When you look through the patio windows (from the outside) you can see the FRONT windows, and light coming through. Hence - possibly - the birds interpret the entire house as a sort of tunnel, and think they can fly through it.

My other thought is that most birds DON'T do this, and that the ones that DO are diseased, elderly, or are for other reasons suffering some sort of sensory intepretation problem.

Or even more simply, they are in a weakened state (possibly for the reasons mentioned above), and are unable to manouvre properly. Their brains say "land on the roof", but their bodies say "too tired/can't co-ordinate... that window looks nice"

Meow Purr.

I've had a few birds that have flown into the windows, seeing their reflections or thinking they could get out...I also read not to long ago, where a deer crashed into a woman's patio door and landed in her living room..Rocket 88, I don't think the decrease in bird population has anything to do with your building patios...

Well if that happened to me. On the 3rd try I would let the bird in

~Ssj2vegeta

As a young teen and home alone, I heard a BANG on our back sliding glass door. It scared the crap out of me and felt that someone was trying to break in. I slowly gazed out and to find a bird on our patio floor knock out or dead.
I never touched it to see if it was alive because I heard they carried diseases. Later I checked to see if it was still there but it was gone, It either flew away or our neighbors cat got to it.