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The glass at McCormick Place in Chicago is a lethal obstacle for birds

theguardian.com

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Re: The glass at McCormick Place in Chicago is a lethal obstacle for birds

#31

Post by katbyte »

xwdv wrote: post #29
nicolaslem wrote: post #4

I highly encourage anyone who had birds crash on their windows to install white dot stickers. I installed some last spring on my windows and not a single bird crashed on them since. At first they look a bit odd, but after a week they were almost invisible, turns out the brain is really good at hiding things we don't care to see. They are a bit of a pain to install but it is well worth the effort.

I don’t like stickers on my windows, ruins the aesthetic. Instead we should have some kind of spray that transmits a wavelength of light only birds could see but is invisible to humans.

UV reflective stickers

Re: The glass at McCormick Place in Chicago is a lethal obstacle for birds

#35

Post by bbarn »

Mildly related anecdote:

At one job, we had an expensive office built out as our company grew. The CEO and CTO came in from out of town to do the ribbon cutting so to speak and welcome us to our new office. I was there as a manager doing setup before we moved the main workforce into the new office, and the CTO came through the kitchen to talk to me, and smashed his face right into a glass wall. Broke his nose and had to fly home eventually.

The day before the team moved in, I convinced the CEO rather easily to put the company logo decalled on that wall.

Re: The glass at McCormick Place in Chicago is a lethal obstacle for birds

#36

Post by dtgriscom »

xoa wrote: post #28
nicolaslem wrote: post #4

I highly encourage anyone who had birds crash on their windows to install white dot stickers. I installed some last spring on my windows and not a single bird crashed on them since. At first they look a bit odd, but after a week they were almost invisible, turns out the brain is really good at hiding things we don't care to see. They are a bit of a pain to install but it is well worth the effort.

Worth mentioning there are pricier but even more invisible, similar idea solutions. I've got stickers I put on my house and have suggested to clients that are translucent in the visible spectrum but strongly reflect UV. Lots of birds (and in particular songbirds, these are on rural residential buildings with no more than 3 stories so raptors aren't going into them) have receptors for ultraviolet, so to them the stick…

The UV stickers sound interesting, but is there a (human-)visual indication that they've stopped working? If not, there'll be a whole lot of useless dots on windows, making owners feel better but not actually helping anything.

Re: The glass at McCormick Place in Chicago is a lethal obstacle for birds

#37

Post by theptip »

dtgriscom wrote: post #36
xoa wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worth mentioning there are pricier but even more invisible, similar idea solutions. I've got stickers I put on my house and have suggested to clients that are translucent in the visible spectrum but strongly reflect UV. Lots of birds (and in particular songbirds, these are on rural residential buildings with no more than 3 stories so raptors aren't going into them) have receptors for ultraviolet, so to them the stick…

The UV stickers sound interesting, but is there a (human-)visual indication that they've stopped working? If not, there'll be a whole lot of useless dots on windows, making owners feel better but not actually helping anything.

Presumably you get the auditory indication of birds resuming their collisions with your window.

Re: The glass at McCormick Place in Chicago is a lethal obstacle for birds

#38

Post by xoa »

dtgriscom wrote: post #36
xoa wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worth mentioning there are pricier but even more invisible, similar idea solutions. I've got stickers I put on my house and have suggested to clients that are translucent in the visible spectrum but strongly reflect UV. Lots of birds (and in particular songbirds, these are on rural residential buildings with no more than 3 stories so raptors aren't going into them) have receptors for ultraviolet, so to them the stick…

The UV stickers sound interesting, but is there a (human-)visual indication that they've stopped working? If not, there'll be a whole lot of useless dots on windows, making owners feel better but not actually helping anything.

Unless you have a UV camera then no, there is no indication to humans [0]. Though as sibling said, if nothing else you'd have the obvious direct grim evidence if they had failed. But at the same time I've not found it a concern in practice, there's plenty of stuff in a household that simply needs to be replaced/renewed on an annual or semi-annual basis with no particular indicator before failure. Just part of building maintenance. I set an annual calendar notification and roll it into spring/fall cleanup lists along with things like gutter cleaning. They don't just fail at wildly varying rates, it's a straight forward curve of breakdown so when it says "replace these every 6 months" one can just do that.

----

0: FWIW you can get basic simple monochrome UV-USB 1080p cameras (350-380nm range or so, to get down to 300nm requires much more expensive lenses) to play with for <$250 new, similar to basic low res FLIRs. They can be interesting looks at the world, you can see everything from sunscreen applications to UV patterns on some flowers.

Re: The glass at McCormick Place in Chicago is a lethal obstacle for birds

#39

Post by sandworm101 »

I worked in a building that attempted to address this. The three-story glass lobby had its glass wall raked outwards by 30*. If you approached the glass from inside then your feet would contact it before your face, which really helped at night when outside was brighter than the interior. And birds on the outside would see a reflection of the ground rather than transparent glass. All seemed good. Until a convention of blind people booked the lobby for a meeting. When they approached the building from the outside, their canes did not detect the glass wall prior to their faces smacking into it. We hurriedly erected foot-high barriers so their canes has something to see before impact.
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