Window Strikes and Birds

Neat piece on NPR's "Morning Edition" this morning about Daniel Klem's work on preventing window strikes, centering on a new glass-walled building at Swarthmore College. The current solution is to use glass with small, faint circles etched into the surface. This seems to make the glass visible to birds and does not significantly obstruct the transparency of the glass for humans.

Several years ago we published an article in Bird Watcher's Digest on a homemade solution to window strikes, called FeatherGuard. This solution works really well at our farm and so I worked with the author of the article, Stiles Thomas, to develop FeatherGuard as a retail product. Here is my article from Backyard Bird News, "Top Ten Ways to Prevent Window Strikes."

I'm excited to watch for the development and commercial availability of this new etched glass. It would be great if bird watchers (and ordinary civilians) could buy this glass for their homes. I'm sure we'd all be willing to pay a little extra to help make our windows safer for birds.