Christine Whelan FEO, October 13, 2022, VOL. 4 ISSUE 4

Members of the Bird Friendly City – Fort Erie team participated in Global Bird Rescue (GBR) from October 3rd to 9th, an annual event hosted by FLAP Canada (Fatal Light Awareness Program), designed to raise awareness about bird-building collisions and to inspire home and workplace bird-safe retrofits across the globe.

During this peak of bird fall migration in North America, an estimated four billion birds will navigate built environments as they travel southward to their wintering grounds. Millions of birds will not arrive at their destination due to a fatal collision with a building. Our local group of citizens is helping to ensure that these birds survive their journey.

Locally

I spoke with Lynda Goodridge, a member of the local group, on October 3rd, just after their first of seven days of monitoring.

“We did our first monitoring this morning at 9:30.” Lynda began describing their morning. “We monitored three buildings in the Municipal Centre Drive area: Town Hall, Boys and Girls Club and The Willows Residence.”

The highest building is Albany Place Apartments, with eight stories. “We have permission to monitor that building as well.”

“This is our first year so we are first checking out public buildings with large windows. There are a couple that is private and I’ve asked permission to check those locations, as well.”

Lynda explained what is involved for them. “We had to walk the perimeter of the building. We had to be fairly close to the windows, about a metre from each, and we looked for dead or injured birds. There’s lots and lots of shrubbery around a lot of the buildings so this made it a little bit difficult because a bird if injured, will try and crawl someplace to get shelter.”

“I didn’t really think that we would find anything because we don’t have really high buildings,” which, while making the event uneventful, is a good thing.

Goodridge explained that they have a kit they use if they do find a bird.

“We will be monitoring these three buildings every day this week. and we’ll check Albany a couple of times.”

Globally

“Once we’re done, we have to put all the data into a Global Bird Collision Mapper (GBCM), which is where everyone around the globe puts its data. It asks if you’ve found any birds, dead or alive, asking for photos of them to make sure the identification is correct. There is a category for no birds. They keep track of it all.”

Migration

There are birds who follow the path of the Niagara River for the constant availability of food, “But there are other birds that are heading towards Lake Erie, going south, they don’t all go up the river. We find migrant birds in Shagbark Woods in Ridgeway all the time, too.”

They come in waves. “The birds fly down to places where they think there might be food, then they’ll proceed. Sometimes, they come down on this side of Lake Ontario and then they get their second wind and go right through. They might not even stop at Lake Erie. There are migration paths and we seem to be in the middle of two right now.”

How We All Can Help

According to Lynda, there are single-family residences that can have bird strikes as well. It’s fairly common for this to happen.

“One of the things I wanted to emphasize is that, as a homeowner, there are things people can do to limit bird strikes on their home. FLAP Canada offers stuff you can buy for your windows.”

She added, “And it’s not the things you think. People think if you put pictures of hawks or other birds, for instance, on a window this will work but that actually isn’t good. FLAP has these tiny dots. It’s tape you put on your window. You can see everything out the window perfectly well but the birds see it enough that they know it’s not a reflection.”

When asked if people can create something themselves to put on their window, Goodridge replied, “As long as it’s not something that birds might think is a natural perch or a tree branch. I know someone who used to put these plants in front of the window. They were big enough to deter the birds. I’ve seen people hang chimes in front of their windows.”

Closing curtains will also help if lights need to be on during these times.

Lynda clarified the issues and the changes that need to be made. “The main problem is that, if you have a window that reflects a tree in your yard or something similar, the bird thinks it’s flying into a tree. A lot depends on the orientation of the window.

“Another thing that Global Bird Rescue is trying to promote this year is the importance of dimming the lights. During the migration periods in the spring and the fall, if lights are turned out overnight, especially in the tall buildings, the birds won’t be attracted to them.” Birds are attracted to the light and when they follow the light, they fly right into the window.

FLAP in Toronto, with all the high-rise buildings, gets most of their collisions at night. “People are out there in the morning, gathering up the birds.” They’ve been able to save some of them but most don’t survive.

“I know that there’s also an attempt now, with all the lighting on the buildings and in the streets, to have downward-facing lighting. Actually, Fort Erie does have some of these, with a cap or top on it, so that the lights don’t shoot straight up but rather shoot down.” This helps because the birds don’t pick up on these lights quite as much.

“The towers in New York City have memorials that have lights going straight up. During the migration, the naturalists were able to get the lights turned off during the nights when the birds were passing through because they were finding that birds were congregating there, being attracted by the lights, and flying into the buildings that are in the area.”

Moving Forward

“The purpose of the event is to try to raise awareness, using this data as evidence, that we need to try and get people with taller buildings to help by getting the right kind of glass, putting deterring things on or around their windows and turning their lights off during peak migration periods.”

Lynda added, “If we’ve got the evidence, proof that birds are actually flying into these buildings and this is not just somebody making it up, it makes more of an impact,

Bird-Friendly Status

“Right now, Fort Erie is still working on what needs to be done to make it a “bird-friendly city”. We’ve got quite a bit of the criteria already, we just need a bit more. We’re hoping that the new Council will also agree that this is a very worthwhile venture for Fort Erie and that we’ll be able to get our status in 2023 or shortly thereafter.”

When I inquired about this status, Lynda replied, “There’s certification as a bird-friendly city. There are not too many small towns with this status. This would be a real coup for Fort Erie. And, of course, we get to use all the marketing stuff that goes along with it. This is quite a popular birding area with the Niagara River and Lake Erie. We could use this for eco-tourism. That could be a nice draw.” With the development coming in, she hopes the Town will create more bird-friendly conditions.

The condos going up in Waverly have to meet certain similar standards. Lynda is a part of the group that has been advocating for Waverly Woods, Community Voices of Fort Erie.

Social media has shown us that Fort Erie has quite a birding community. “I think with COVID, people discovered the outdoors and how therapeutic it is, how much they enjoy the natural areas. Bird watching is a natural segue from there.

“Birds are an important part of our ecosystem and we want to keep that biological ecological balance, biodiversity. Birds and all the other aspects of nature need to work together to help create a healthy environment for us.”

(Fatal Light Awareness Program) FLAP Canada, is a Canadian charity with a mission to “work to safeguard migratory birds in the built environment through education, policy development, research, rescue and rehabilitation”.

Results from the days that we monitored.- The first three days we had no bird collisions at all, happily. Then on Thursday, we did find a Yellow-rumped Warbler that met its end. This was on the south side of Town Hall.

If you are interested in learning more about FLAP, you can check out their website: flap.org

Photo provided by Lynda Goodridge

From the left – Anne Mills, Lynda Goodridge, Christine Knighton.