Fangliang Xu, Centretown News
Anouk Hoedeman collects birds that have collided with highrises in downtown Ottawa.Every fall, high above Ottawa’s towering offices and sprawling city streets, a great migration takes place. From mid-August to November, hundreds of birds, from warblers to waxwings to woodpeckers, cross the city each night as they flee the chill of the approaching winter.
But for many, Ottawa becomes their final destination.
Exhausted and disoriented by glass facades, an estimated one billion birds die each year by flying into windows across North America. That’s why local wildlife enthusiast Anouk Hoedeman teamed up with Nature Canada this spring to found the Ottawa chapter of its Fatal Light Awareness Program – known as FLAP.
“It’s not sustainable,” says Hoedeman, a 20-year veteran birder. “Bird populations have been in decline drastically over the last century or so. The more glass buildings we put up the worse it gets. There are different causes, but window strikes are clearly a very, very big problem.”
Fall is the worst time of year for birds. The migration is at its peak in September and October, and for many of the young migrants, it’s their first time seeing a city.
That’s why FLAP patrols the downtown core every day of the three-month period. They rise at dawn, documenting the victims and snatching up survivors to take to the Wild Bird Care Centre in Nepean.
With the fall migration over, FLAP can celebrate its first complete migratory cycle. The fall patrols have yielded a collection of over 300 birds representing more than 65 distinct species. However, Hoedeman says that’s only a fraction of the casualties.
“I think it would be optimistic to say we’re finding 10 per cent of the birds that hit in these particular buildings,” she says. “And then there’s the whole rest of the city.”
Window strikes are ranked as the second-greatest cause of death for Canada’s wild birds, surpassed only by habitat loss.
Even though houses far outnumber high-rises, Hoedeman says a single high-rise can kill thousands of birds each year.
While FLAP has been operating in Toronto for 20 years, Hoedeman says window-strikes only earned awareness in Ottawa after a flock of Bohemian waxwings slammed into city hall’s glass walkway in 2013.
“There were just dozens of birds dead and dying, and people horrified and it made the news,” she says.
It all comes down to glass. Mirrored glass reflects trees and sky, while clear glass is nearly undetectable. Architectural features such as columns and alcoves worsen the problem.
“When you have different mirrored surfaces reflecting off of each other, it’s like a house of mirrors for a bird,” Hoedeman says.
The victims aren’t your usual city residents; pigeons and crows have long since learned to stay clear of buildings. The newcomers fly from the boreal forest and beyond, ranging from tiny hummingbirds to owls with huge wing spans.
Volunteers even found a rare black-backed woodpecker, dead on the sidewalk at Laurier and O’Connor.
“Running around picking up birds is fine, but we have to stop it in the first place,” says Sanrda Garland, a FLAP volunteer and webmaster at the Ottawa Field-Naturalist’s Club. “Stop them from hitting the windows by changing the way we build buildings.”
That’s why every strike is documented in a database, which will be used to persuade building owners to make their buildings more bird-friendly.
Hoedeman says specially-patterned glass films are the best modification.
The subtle coatings are much more visible to birds than humans, whereas traditional window decals are only effective if tightly-spaced in large numbers.
Already, FLAP has earned the University of Ottawa’s support. A ground team was formed this fall to start collecting victims for documentation.
Johnathan Rausseo, manager of sustainable development at the university, has begun investigating other bird-friendly ideas.
“A lot of the stuff’s actually pretty easy,” Rausseo says. “In some cases, it’s just not using 100-per cent clear glass.”
The university is also considering adopting bird-friendly glass into its building standard, which would require architects to use it in all future buildings.
To Hoedeman, it’s a step in the right direction.
But as long as the core’s glass high-rises pose a risk to migratory populations, she’ll be up at dawn patrolling the streets with FLAP.