On Friday evening I let the dog out into the back yard, and she startled some little birds that were on the lawn. Most of them flew the hell out of there ASAP, but one of them just flew a few feet at a time, never very high, and then would land again. My dog quickly cornered it, at first just barking a lot – she’d never gotten that close to a bird before – but gradually gaining both nerve and ground.
I protected the terrified bird while getting my overexcited dog to stand still long enough for me to snap her leash on her collar, then I dragged her back into the house (“No bird for you!”). I called the county’s animal control division, and reported an injured bird that was unable to fly out of my yard. An animal control officer arrived within a half hour, and we couldn’t find the bird! At first he thought maybe a neighborhood cat got it, but he kept asking me questions about its behavior – e.g., had it been spreading its wings and flying at all? – and as soon as I described the low/short flights he confidently said, “Concussion.” He explained that sometimes birds will fly hard into a tree or something and stun themselves, and they need 15-30 minutes to get unscrambled and be able to really fly again.
Happens at our front window at least a few times a week. They drop in to the flower boxes below and hang out for a little while before flying away (most of them, anyway, as a few have hit hard enough to break their necks).
Raptors swooping down on prey often hit the ground hard and stun themselves , I once looked out the window and saw a Red-tailed hawk standing on the highway. I went out and it allowed me to walk right up to it. I got a cardboard box and picked it up and set it out off the shoulder so a car wouldn’t hit it, and it remained there for quite a while, but when I looked out a couple of hours later, it was gone.
We had a dove hit our kitchen window recently and it fell and died as we stared in disbelief. Before we could even say, “Aww, poor thing” a Red Shouldered Hawk landed 3 feet from the window, looked up at us, took a few hops, grabbed the dove in its talons and took off into the air with it. I’m so glad our dogs were inside, Chihuahuas. I guess the hawk was chasing the dove. He won. I put the gels on that window immediately. The only problem now is that they’re getting furry. My cat naps in the sunshine on that window sill.
I was amazed that the bird in my yard eventually stopped trying to fly away and let both my dog and me get so close to it, but I think by that point it was just overwhelmed and waiting for death-by-canine. Poor bird: a concussion wasn’t enough, it got to be terrified, too!
It has no effect on the viable population. A species, in its niche, is capable of maintaining an optimum population. If a million crash into windows and get killed, a million additional chicks will be sustained by the niche environment and survive to adulthood. It’s not true that, without any windows, there would be 100-million more birds. If there were, that many would probably starve.
A hundred million birds is not a large number. That’s one bird for every three Americans. Surely a tolerable loss, considering that the average American , before the modern market-based economy, used to kill and eat maybe a hundred pounds of wild game a year.
Are you sure it wasn’t a fledgeling? Young birds do those low/short hoppy flights too, and can act a bit gormless.
I feed birds daily, and have wondered if I ought to put those decals on my windows. I’ve never noticed birds coming at or near my windows - mine have mullions, and I don’t think they’re as confusing to a bird as large sheets of glass.
Regardless of it’s importance in the ecological scheme of things, especially from a human perspective, it’s such a simple thing to do - why wouldn’t you try to mitigate potential harm?
This assumes that the population is limited by food alone. This may be true for some species, and not others. An additional source of mortality can have a negative effect on the population of some species.
Market hunting during the 19th century caused the decline of many species of birds, including ducks, shorebirds, and most notably the extinction of the Passenger Pigeon. It may also have contributed to the extinction of the Eskimo Curlew.
I grew up in a modified A-frame house with giant front windows. You better believe birds smacked into them hard all the time. A few of them died on impact, some were fairly badly injured and others recovered just fine after a few minutes. I even had a spare bird cage in my room to rehabilitate the injured ones before letting them free again. I don’t know if it was the best idea but I think I saved a few over the years that wouldn’t have made it otherwise.
There was, at the same time, a significant decline in habitat, which very likely would have decimated vulnerable species as much as hunting, and certainly a great deal more than glass windows ever possibly could. It is possible to name a small number of species that reached extinction, but population numbers of species were affected by human presence according to how vulnerable they were, and only in a few instances, by a heavy hunting pressure.
I raised that point to contrast the death of (a probably exaggerated) 100-million window collisions against what is certainly a larger number who simply fly back to their breeding ground and find that it has been drained or paved over or clearcut, and they die just as surely. In the overall scheme of things, if we saved every single bird that flew into a glass window, the effect on each species’ viability would be immeasurably minuscule.
If every car in the USA hit one bird every two years on the highway, that would be 100-million birds a year. My car hits a few every year. Even in today’s restricted and controlled times, hunting takes more tonnage of avian life than windows do.
I saw it once, for a couple of minutes before pulling my dog back inside. The next time I went out, it was gone. The animal control officer said “concussion,” and while I guess it could have been a fledgling (who couldn’t fly away from a menacing dog but then somehow made it over the fence…?) the point of the thread is that I didn’t know it was possible for birds to get concussions.
Yep. I pretty much grew up in a house with two large picture windows in one corner of the living room; birds crashing into one of them was pretty common.
