YuLin Zhen, Contributing Photographer

For the Yale Bird-Friendly Building Initiative, hope is the thing with feathers and data.

Founded in 2022 with grant funding from the Planetary Solutions Project, the Bird-Friendly Building Initiative has researched ways we might reimagine urban spaces to better accommodate birds. By assessing policy proposals for more bird-friendly cities and tracking bird deaths across the University, the project has started making an impact on campus building projects.

“[Bird collisions are a] bigger issue than people think often,” Viveca Morris ’15 ENV ’18 SOM ’19, executive director of the Yale Law, Ethics and Animals Program, said to the News. “With the initiative, we’ve tried to create a data-driven plan for what the university can do.”

According to Morris, urban spaces are significant — and often overlooked — contributors to wildlife deaths. Since birds struggle to perceive glass, building windows results in an estimated 365 million to one billion annual bird deaths nationwide — a figure that may only grow with the construction of large, reflective structures.

One of the initiative’s priorities has involved research on the effectiveness of local bird-friendly policy efforts.

Released last August, the initiative’s “Building Safer Cities for Birds” report compared the success of local bird-friendly policy across regions such as New York City and Arlington, Virginia. The report cited the need for state and national standards to complement local policy and concluded that bird-friendly window material was compatible with green design principles and cost-efficiency.

The initiative has also kept a close focus on home by treating Yale’s campus as a laboratory, Morris explained. By tracking bird-building collisions across Yale, the project seeks to spearhead building standards and demonstrate the effectiveness of retrofitting solutions that might offer a bird-friendly model for other campuses.

In partnership with the Peabody Museum, Morris added that the initiative has monitored collisions during peak bird migration in fall 2022, spring 2023, fall 2023 and soon in spring 2024. Every day over an eight-week period, student volunteers collect fallen birds along three routes across campus.

Peabody collections manager Kristof Zyskowski explained that the bird casualties are sent to the Peabody Museum, where they are photographed, sampled for muscle tissue, prepared and added to the ornithology collection. The frozen tissue samples provide researchers an opportunity to study genetic composition and climate-related geographical shifts of certain species over time. 

“These kinds of specimens document the occurrence of a particular species at a particular place and time and can serve for all sorts of projects — morphology, anatomy, pathogen emergence, pesticide presence,” Zyskowski told the News. “With the state-of-the-art archival conditions provided by the museum, these specimens are expected to last for centuries.”

 According to Zyskowski, the white-throated sparrow and dark-eyed Junco have been especially vulnerable to building collisions. Other common victims include the mourning dove, black-capped chickadee and ruby-throated hummingbirds.

Zyskowski, who has lived in the New Haven area for 22 years, acknowledged that the scale of bird collisions on campus has been “progressively increasing” over the decades since the construction of new glass-rich buildings. He estimated that Yale’s campus — along with some downtown New Haven buildings — has experienced over 700 bird casualties in 2023. Based on the data collected by the Yale Bird-Friendly Building Initiative, the School of Management’s Evans Hall and certain buildings on West Campus have been responsible for the greatest number of casualties on Yale’s campus.

However, Morris added that the initiative’s data collection has helped pave the way for more thoughtful building design on campus.

In 2019, the Yale Office of Facilities adopted a bird-collision mitigation design standard. In an email to the News, Cathy Jackson, director of planning administration for Yale’s Office of Facilities, said that the University has since been working to “[apply] bird safety measures to more of its existing buildings.”

Jackson added that a growing market for bird-friendly products has helped make more options available. Bird-friendly windows involve fritted, or patterned glass that increases their visibility to wildlife. Recently, safety film has also introduced designs that break up reflections.

The building standards have impacted a suite of buildings across campus. 87 Trumbull St. — the University’s latest home for its economics department — featured all bird-friendly windows in its design. The Peabody Museum — which opens later this spring — incorporated fritted windows into its renovation plans as well.

According to Jackson, the Office of Facilities has piloted the use of a patterned safety film at the School of Nursing and just wrapped up a mitigation project on the Collection Studies Center at West Campus, a building with “high collision levels.” She added that the Bird-Friendly Initiative helped track some of their initial mitigation projects to assess their success.

The initiative has also brought changes to the School of Management.

In an email to the News, School of Management media relations director Rosalind D’Eugenio explained that a 2022 pilot project successfully tested the effects of bird-friendly film on one side of the building. During a later eight-week monitoring period, the treated face reported no collisions.

Since then, the school has settled on a horizontal-striped pattern that “will maintain the aesthetic of the Evans Hall building design” and “reduce the heat load of the building.” The retrofitting project will begin once “the weather allows for another installation.”

Zyskowski said that the bird-friendly retrofitting projects at both Evans Hall and the West Campus buildings have already started paying dividends as these buildings have seen a significant collision reduction. Similarly, new university building projects that used bird-friendly glass, such as 87 Trumbull St., have reported “zero mortality” thus far, per Zyskowski.

“What’s really exciting is we’ve made a lot of progress in getting some of the worst buildings — in terms of bird kills — retrofitted, and that progress and work continues,” Morris said.

Morris added that the Bird-Friendly Building Initiative plans to release its data analysis in a publication later this summer.

Jackson said that inexperience was one of the construction industry’s initial challenges to addressing bird-building collisions. However, that changed after a “watershed moment” in 2019 when New York City adopted Local Law 15, requiring buildings to use bird-friendly materials on their exteriors.

Bird-building collisions have coincided with a decades-long decline in common bird species across North America. According to a study, the continent has seen the disappearance of roughly 3 billion birds — or 29 percent of the population — between 1970 and 2018; human development, pesticide use and deforestation could all be to blame.

The Yale Peabody Museum ornithology collection currently houses more than 152,000 bird specimens.