On any given day in spring or fall, Michael Mesure can be found trolling the perimeters of Toronto office buildings in search of birds.
But rather than spotting them in flight, he’s busy recovering carcasses.
What drives him to carry out such a macabre task? Typically, windows that reflect a bird’s natural habitat, such as trees or the daytime sky, or brightly lit offices that attract feathered flyers at night. In both cases, birds make the fatal mistake of hurtling into the hard surfaces, usually resulting in their deaths.
It’s a problem Mr. Mesure, the executive director of the Toronto-based Fatal Light Awareness Program (FLAP), an advocacy group dedicated to minimizing preventable avian deaths, has spent the past 20 years working with architects, building managers and owners to overcome.
Birds, particularly species that migrate in spring and fall, tend to become disoriented around glass buildings. If the surface is reflective, they think they’re flying through the open sky before meeting a beak-crunching fate. Others nest in trees near commercial or residential buildings. When they wake and begin the search for food, the birds fly to the next tree, which is often a reflection of the one they just left.
A handful of structures with particularly reflective facades in the Toronto area experience bird collisions of about 500 to 2,000 each per year, according to FLAP, while the majority of Toronto’s estimated 940,000 structures post annual collision rates of between one and 10 strikes. “Our record is more than 500 birds in a six-hour period at one Toronto facility,” he says. “It was hailing birds that day.”
Building owners are being held to account for bird deaths on their properties.
Horizontal striped film on atrium glass is reducing bird collisions at a building owned by the Town of Markham.
In a novel move this spring, environmental groups Ontario Nature and Ecojustice initiated a private legal action under the Ontario Environmental Protection Act and the Ontario Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act against Menkes Developments Ltd., a Toronto-based commercial building and management firm. The legal tactic has not been used before in Ontario, Ecojustice lawyer Albert Koehl says.
At issue is bird strikes at Consilium Place, a Scarborough office complex that is clad completely in mirrored glass. FLAP estimates more than 7,000 dead birds have been recovered there since 2000.
But as awareness builds, fewer birds are dying.
Lights Out Toronto, a project encouraging building tenants to switch off their office lights to avoid attracting migratory birds, has reduced the number of high-rise bird strikes while offering another green benefit – decreased power usage.
Several commercial landlords in the city participate in the program, and the Toronto-based Building Owners and Managers Association of Canada has incorporated bird-friendly light pollution control requirements in its BOMA Best environmental certification.
Some North American municipalities have even begun requiring bird-friendly building designs.
The City of Toronto’s Green Standard, for example, now requires builders to mute external reflections or apply density patterns to windows – typically horizontal lines spaced no more than 10 to 28 centimetres apart – for the first 10 to 12 metres above grade level, where 90 per cent of bird collisions occur.
The incoming birds see the window patterns, realize they’re flying toward a solid structure and adjust their flight path. Chicago and other cities have introduced similar guidelines.
In one example, the Town of Markham, Ont., applied a pattern to the windows of one of its collision-prone municipal buildings last year and hasn’t reported a bird strike since – save for one panel that had yet to be treated. In this case, the $50,000 retrofit on roughly 30,000 to 35,000 square feet of glass even offered some aesthetic benefits.
“When we installed the film, our staff thought it was there to make the building look nicer,” says Victoria McGrath, director of Markham’s sustainability office.
For its part, Menkes says it has employed numerous bird strike-prevention measures at the Consilium property since late 2006, when the company bought the complex.
