Opening the black box of bird-window collisions

[Still Waters]

Collisions with glass windows on buildings, transportation shelters, noise barriers and fences are a major source of bird mortality. Public awareness of bird-window collisions has grown in recent years, thanks to surveys for dead birds beneath windows. However, as collisions events are difficult to observe directly, there are still major gaps in understanding how and why birds fly into windows, and what happens to the birds afterwards.

New research published in the journal PeerJ provides the first glimpse of what happens in the moments leading up to a bird colliding or avoiding impact with a window, by analyzing audio and motion-triggered video recordings at a residential setting with bird feeders. The article offers novel insight on a very important conservation topic and provides empirical data that are currently lacking but necessary for informing estimates of population-level impacts of bird mortality as well as designing effective collision prevention technologies.

https://phys.org/news/2022-12-black-bird-window-collisions-passive-video.html

https://peerj.com/articles/14604/