Dead bird rabbit hole
Every December, during the Christmas Bird Count, tens of thousands of volunteers look to the skies for an international census of wild birds.
But during migration season, a much smaller squad of New York City volunteers take on a more sobering experience: counting dead birds that have collided with glass buildings and fallen back to Earth.
In this episode, we find out what kind of people volunteer for this grisly job, visit the New York City rehab center that takes in injured pigeons, and find out how to stop glass from killing an estimated one billion birds nationwide every year.
Featuring Melissa Breyer, Linda LaBella, Gitanjali Bhattacharjee, Katherine Chen, and Tristan Higginbotham. Cover photo, and gallery above courtesy of Mellissa Breyer. See her Instagram account, Sad Birding, for more.
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LINKS
Want to see the migration forecast? Check out Birdcast.
Want to be a citizen scientist and report dead birds? Check out dBird.
Want to see volunteer Melissa Breyer’s photos of dead birds? Check out Sad Birding.
More about Project Safe Flight.
CREDITS
Host: Nate Hegyi
Reported, produced, and mixed by Taylor Quimby
Editing by Rebecca Lavoie and Nate Hegyi.
Our staff includes Justine Paradis and Felix Poon
Executive producer: Taylor Quimby
Rebecca Lavoie is NHPR’s Director of On-Demand Audio
Music by Blue Dot Sessions.
Outside/In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio
If you’ve got a question for the Outside/Inbox hotline, give us a call! We’re always looking for rabbit holes to dive down into. Leave us a voicemail at: 1-844-GO-OTTER (844-466-8837). Don’t forget to leave a number so we can call you back.
Audio Transcript
Note: Episodes of Outside/In are made as pieces of audio, and some context and nuance may be lost on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors.
Nate Hegyi: This is Outside/In, a show where curiosity and the natural world collide. I’m Nate Hegyi.
Taylor Quimby: Well. [clears throat] Good morning.
This April, right around dawn, producer Taylor Quimby visited the World Trade Center complex in Manhattan.
He was there to meet a volunteer…
Melissa Breyer: How's it going?
Taylor Quimby: Good. How are you doing?
Melissa Breyer: Good. I already did a quick circuit just to make sure there were no nocturnal collisions before they got swept up…
[mux]
This is Melissa Breyer. She works in this neighborhood.
But this morning, she walked right past her office building… her eyes trained on the ground.
Taylor Quimby: How did you discover the program?
Melissa Breyer: Well, it was during the pandemic lockdown, and everything was so - we’re going to go this way - everything was so tense and hard in New York City. I was getting a lot of emotional relief from looking at birds in Central Park on Twitter during spring migration of 2020, because that was when we were in peak lockdown. And then a photo crossed my Twitter feed of a bunch of dead birds all on a sidewalk that were all found one morning, and I was like, whoa! So then I just went down the dead bird rabbit hole, and my whole Twitter just became dead birds.
[mux starts]
Melissa Breyer is what you might call a “dead birder.” She’s one of a number of volunteers who look for migrating songbirds that have crashed into glass windows, and plummeted to the pavement.
She even documents her findings on an Instagram account called “Sad Birding.”
Melissa Breyer: Look at how beautiful… Look a little hummingbird. That was one morning.
Taylor Quimby: You're holding... one, two, three, four, five birds in each hand. And there's another ten or so on the ground.
Melissa Breyer: I found 41 birds that day, according to my notes here. These were nine blackburnian warblers, nine of the same bird that was probably part of a flock, if not a whole flock.
[mux swells]
A lot of people have encountered a dead bird on the sidewalk. But these kinds of collisions are much more than freak accidents.
So today on Outside/In, producer Taylor Quimby is taking us down the dead bird rabbit hole… to learn about just how many birds are smashing into our windows… and to meet the volunteers and scientists that are doing something about it.
Melissa Breyer: When I tell people about it, they're like, that's so depressing. And I'm like, I know it really is, isn't it? [laughs] But…I don’t know. It makes you not want to stop until every building is fixed.
[mux]
Taylor Quimby: Manhattan at 6am isn’t exactly quiet – but it is unusually devoid of people.
And that’s one reason the dead birders try to get here so early.
Linda LaBella: Well, the sun has already come up and the sweepers have already been out, so.
Taylor Quimby: Oh, so this is like a war, huh? With the sweepers?
Linda LaBella: Well, I wouldn't call it a war.
This is Linda LaBella. She’s leading me on my first patrol of the morning. Her purple hair is stuffed under a baseball cap with a big bald eagle on it.
Linda LaBella: Plus, some of them really, um, are told to clean up right away. They don't want to see the dead birds.
Taylor Quimby: Yeah. If that’s your job...I get it.
Linda LaBella: Yeah, yeah.
Linda has been documenting building collisions in New York City since 2019. But the program she’s volunteering for – Project Safe Flight – started way back in 1997.
It’s a cheery name for a somewhat grim operation. In the early days, it was a single woman scanning the sidewalks for dead and injured birds.
Today, it’s a full-fledged citizen science program run by New York City Audubon.
Linda LaBella: How was your commute?
Gitanjali Bhattacharjee: I missed one train by one minute. It was annoying.
A few minutes after I met Linda, I met her new Project Safe Flight trainee - Gitanjali Bhattacharjee.
Linda LaBella: You can't trust the trains. So 18 building 18. We got here at 603 and we went through pretty fast…
Each patrol has a clipboard, and a black and white satellite photo of the area they monitor. The sides of each building are marked 1, 2, 3, 4.
This one has all of the various World Trade Center buildings - so the numbered map look like something you’d see on a CIA document… or a 9/11 conspiracy movie.
Linda LaBella: Birds hit and they pop out about three feet and then the live ones will immediately if they can get up towards the end of the building. But the dead ones are usually out here.
Linda and Gitanjalee walk along each facade, peering into grates and sidewalk planters with flashlights, looking for dazed birds that may have survived.
We’re walking past iconic places - Zuccotti Park. The 9/11 memorial fountains.
After every circuit, Gitanjalee jots down the time, and a few other details.
Gitanjali Bhattacharjee: There's a section for environmental data. Um, like what the weather is like. If it's light, average, heavy, the temperature.
And of course, they note the number of dead and injured birds, which thus far has been zero.
But if we did stumble on one, Linda has a Trader Joe's tote bag full of items slung over her shoulder.
Linda LaBella: I have hand sanitizer, I have a cloth to catch the bigger birds.
Project Safe Flight volunteers don’t just count birds. They collect them.
Live ones are placed in paper bags, which are porous, so they can breathe.
Dead birds…
Linda LaBella: I reuse old sandwich bags. So, for the carcasses.
[mux]
Before I know it, we’ve reached the end of my first patrol.
Taylor Quimby: So how many more buildings to go? I don't have the map.
Gitanjali Bhattacharjee: This is the last one. Yep.
Taylor Quimby: That was it, huh?
Gitanjali Bhattacharjee: Yep. That's it.
I’ve hit about 5,000 steps for the day, and it’s not even 7am.
Taylor Quimby: What do you think so far?
Gitanjali Bhattacharjee: That's a nice way to start a Friday. But having said that, I haven't found any birds so I might feel differently once once that starts happening. Um.
Linda LaBella: Next week.
Gitanjali Bhattacharjee: Next week.
[mux]
During early migration - like the day in April, when I patrolled with Project Safe Flight - documented collisions are often in the single digits. But as things get closer to peak migration, those numbers can surge. Dramatically.
And volunteers can literally see it coming.
They use a website called Birdcast, that shows real-time bird migrations the way Accuweather might show you an incoming thunderstorm.
It actually siphons data from the same doppler radar stations - which don’t just pick up precipitation, but also flocks of birds, bats, even swarms of mayflies.
Meteorologists usually discard that as noise, but Birdcast does just the opposite.
So volunteers like Linda and Gitanjali can look at a heat map of the country, and see when birds will be passing through New York City by the tens of thousands.
And as collisions do start racking up - the feathered corpses they collect wind up here:
Katherine Chen: These are from, um, previous year…
A freezer, tucked in the corner of a conference room, at the New York City Audubon.
Taylor Quimby: Uh, their feet are so tiny. A hermit thrush?
Katherine Chen: Yes. Um, yes, they're very small. This is actually not even one of the smallest birds that we get. Um, so this one is a thrush. Let me see if I can...
Flipping through plastic bags of frozen songbirds is Katherine Chen, the group’s senior manager of community science and collision reduction.
Taylor Quimby: Can I can I hold it for a second? I don't think I've ever picked up a bird.
Katherine Chen: Yeah.
Taylor Quimby: Oh, it's so light.
Katherine Chen: Yeah, they're incredibly light. Um, their bones are hollow, which makes it so that they can fly. But it also means that they are very lightweight creatures. So this is an American red star. It was found by Melissa Breyer, who you were walking around with this morning, in 2021.
Taylor Quimby: So this has been in this freezer for three years.
Katherine Chen: Yeah. We had more… they used to be in the bigger freezer…
[mux]
Birds fly into windows for the same reason people occasionally walk into glass sliding doors: glass is transparent.
The real problem is, birds don’t have the architectural context to know better.
Katherine Chen: So I have actually seen a bird collision before. Um, and it was at my family's home. We have a large glass window… And I had been inside the house. I had heard a thump. And I went outside and I saw this little bird just sitting on the ground. And it was not dead. It was, um, just a little dazed, but it let me pick it up. And at the time, it was so bewildered. I didn't know why it was sitting here. I didn't know what had happened. I never figured that out until I learned about window collisions. And then I, like, flashed back to that memory and realized, oh, that's what's happening.
In a way, collisions are more visible than the biggest threat to birds, which is habitat loss.
But they’re also easy to overlook at freak accidents, or isolated incidents.
And let me tell you: that is not the case.
Katherine Chen: So it's estimated that up to a billion birds die in the U.S. alone from bird collisions every year.
A billion birds per year. From hitting glass.
That number dwarfs the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s list of other depressing things birds collide with on a regular basis: cars, electric wires, communications towers.
Aside from habitat loss, the only quantifiable thing killing more birds than windows… are cats.
[mux swells and ends]
Katherine got her masters studying building collisions. She can tell you that the wall-to-wall glass - the kind you see on fancy skyscrapers - is worse than individual windows. Lighting, especially at night, plays a big role. Weather conditions can have an effect.
What isn’t a big factor, surprisingly, is the height of buildings.
When the light hits it just right, glass reflects trees and bushes and attracts birds who are looking for a place to land or forage.
So most building collisions happen in just the first few floors. Ironically, it’s the combination of windows and green spaces that are luring them into a trap.
Katherine Chen: For a lot of people, at least for me, once you learn about the issue, you don't stop seeing it. So every single time I go outside, and I see all the glass and how reflective the buildings are, I just think “window collisions,” and I never see the city or any other building in the same way again.
In other words, this is not just a city problem. It happens in small towns, and suburbs, in so many drips and drabs, you never think to add it all together.
But every now and again, there are days so bad - it becomes impossible to look the other way.
[mux]
Nate Hegyi: That’s coming up. First - a big thanks to everybody who gave during our little mini-fund drive. It’s not too late to get an axolotl mug, there’s a link in the show notes - but anyway, we couldn’t do it without you.
BREAK
Melissa Breyer: This primary call is a robin. And then there's a white throated sparrow in the background. That's more of a whistling. Sounds like it’s over in that direction somewhere…
Just a block away from the World Trade Center is a grove of trees that rise up between an office building and the Hudson River.
Taylor Quimby: This is like a quiet, calm morning spot in Manhattan.
Melissa Breyer: Beautiful here, it’s really beautiful. That was the white-throated sparrow.
Melissa Breyer has big clear-framed glasses that give her an owlish look. She was taking on my second patrol of the morning, when we stopped here to talk about what she calls “her bad day.”
Melissa Breyer: So, September of 2021… I saw that there was a high migration alert for the night before. I packed up my bag and got to World Trade Center about 6:15, and I saw birds everywhere on the sidewalk. Usually if you see a couple on a facade, you’re like OK, it’s going to be a day… but I saw so many birds, and I didn't’ really have any context for it. I didn’t really know this happened. So I was really in shock.
I’ve seen video she took from that day. Again and again, she bends down, and picks up a feathered bundle and places it in a plastic bag.
There are so many of them it looks fake.
Melissa Breyer: Some of them were still alive and stunned, so I was picking up dead birds and putting them in one bag, picking up live birds, putting them in little bags to take to the clinic. The sun started coming up, more pedestrians and passers by were coming and saying, what's happening? What's going on? At that point, once it was lighter and a little later in the morning around seven, the birds were actively crashing into the windows. So I had all these dead birds from overnight, and then all these stunned birds from overnight, and then all these new birds crashing into the windows.
I think about an hour and 15 minutes, I found almost 300 birds.
I probably could have stayed and kept finding birds, but I was really pretty maxed out. And I was carrying 30 injured birds. You know, there's only so many injured birds you can be carrying at one time with two hands. Um. So yeah, that was a pretty, pretty bad day.
[mux]
There’s a name for Melissa’s bad day. It’s called a mass collision event. And if you type it into google, you’ll see other stories popping up just like it.
Fall of 2020, volunteers documented more than 1,000 collisions in downtown Philadelphia.
News clip: Stephen Macy Jusky collects fallen birds around the city…
In October of last year 961 birds died in Chicago at a single convention center.
News clips: This is not a science project - these rows and rows of birds you see here met their death on the migratory…
There’s a certain weight to these mass collision events. They’re like war stories. And you can tell that doing this work means telling them again, and again.
Melissa Breyer: I think a lot of people think what I do is really morbid and don't understand. I'll talk about it with some members of my family. They're like, okay, that's nice. Uh, I'm like, but then I found a woodpecker, and then I found a Chuck Will's widow! And they're like, okay, that's nice.
In general, when I tell people about it, they're like, that's so depressing. And I'm like, I know it really is, isn't it? But. I just I don't know. Yeah. There's a lot of, of happier things one could be doing, but I feel like this is… it's really incredible to see change being made by the data we collect. It's, um, it makes you not want to stop until every building is fixed.
If there is a silver lining to mass collision, it’s that they bring a LOT of attention to an otherwise overlooked problem.
And unlike habitat loss, a problem so large it can make individuals feel powerless - there is a fairly straightforward solution to building collisions.
Dots.
Lots of little dots.
Melissa Breyer: This walkway up here.
Taylor Quimby: Oh yeah. It spans the street. So it's like…
While we walked, Melissa showed me this spot that used to be one of the worst hotspots on her patrol.
It’s this glass causeway that connects two buildings on either side of a street. Birds would slam into it, and then fall into oncoming traffic.
Melissa Breyer: But if you look closely you can see there's a little polka dot on it.
Taylor Quimby: Oh yeah I do.
Melissa Breyer: Yeah it's really hard to see. And when you're up there looking out you can barely see it. Um, but that's reduced collisions here tremendously.
[mux or ambi transition]
Katherine Chen: The golden rule is a two inch by two inch spacing.
This again, is Katherine Chen from the New York City Audubon. She says bird-safe dots can be applied one at a time - which sounds tedious - or with a film that adheres them to windows in a regular pattern.
Some are thin clear stickers that are nearly invisible - better if you’re trying not to ruin a skyline view of New York.
Others are more obvious - like the big glass ferry building that sits on the Hudson River.
Melissa Breyer: You'll start to see they put a high contrast dot here. I think the view is less of an issue here.
Taylor Quimby: Yeah, yeah. You're about to get on a ferry.
Melissa Breyer: Yeah.
Taylor Quimby: Although it still just looks like a design. It looks like…
Melissa Breyer: Like a design element!
And then, there is glass that is designed to be birdsafe in the first place.
Katherine told me about a building in Hell’s Kitchen called The Jacob Javits Center.
Katherine Chen: It was a major bird killer. Um, there were tons of collisions happening there.
Google it if you want, but trust me - you could not imagine a glassier death machine than this convention center.
But in 2014 they renovated the building and used “fritted glass.” It’s imbued with a ceramic etching that is not only visible to birds, but supposedly helps lower energy bills.
Katherine Chen: We continue monitoring a little bit after that construction was complete, and we found that there was a 90% reduction in bird collisions happening at that, uh, convention center.
Taylor Quimby: That’s great. 90% is solid
Katherine Chen: Yeah. You’re never going to have 100% guarantee that no birds will ever strike your building. Sometimes birds actually just fly into a brick wall, and that's not even glass. But you can significantly reduce the number of collisions that are happening by taking bird-safe actions, mitigating your glass, and also turning your lights off at night.
Taylor Quimby. Yeah, I mean what kind of resistance do you see from buildings about this? I mean, is it mostly just a money issue?
Katherine Chen: Um, yeah, sometimes it can be money. Um, actually, lots of times it can be money.
Retrofitting buildings isn’t cheap. Bird safe film has to be applied on the outside to work - and that means equipment, like cranes, and labor.
Plus, they’re just stickers - so every fifteen years or so, they’ll need to be reapplied.
That’s why advocates like New York City Audubon lobbied the city to pass an ordinance requiring new buildings to use bird-safe materials from the get-go.
It worked - and now legislators are considering a bill that would extend that same principle to state owned and leased buildings across New York.
Melissa Breyer: I want to show you this amazing thing that they did here. So we have all of this glass with the dots on it. But they made it an educational moment with these signs.
Taylor Quimby: It says, “millions of birds migrate through New York City each year, we have applied a special film to the glass that makes it visible to birds, preventing collisions.
Melissa Breyer: It just makes me want to cry. It’s so amazing.
[mux]
I get why people might think patrolling the streets for dead birds could sound a little morbid. It’s partially what attracted me to this story.
But that’s only part of the picture. After they send in their Project Safe Flight data, Melissa and other volunteers will sometimes do another loop.
Not in hope of finding more dead birds - but of finding survivors.
Taylor Quimby: How many bird tattoos do you have?
Tristan Higginbotham: Oh my God. O I think like for one, 2345, six six. They've taken over my life.
This is Tristan Higginbotham, songbird supervisor at The Wild Bird Fund.
It bills itself as the only wild animal rehab center in New York City - and when volunteers find survivors, this is where they wind up.
Taylor Quimby: Were you here that day that Melissa picked up, like, 300 birds?
Tristan Higginbotham: Melissa Bryer… Wait, is that who you? Oh, I love her. Yeah, she's a hero. Um, yes, I was yeah. Um, it's really intense.
And yet - the vibe here could not be more different. No quiet mornings and clipboards. This has all the chaos of a pet store turned emergency room.
There’s a turtle tank, squirrel crates, a quarantined area for birds suspected of having avian flu. They do surgeries in a room smaller than my bedroom closet.
Tristan Higginbotham: Um, okay. Down here, we've got some birds flying. Okay? So just…
Taylor Quimby: That's fine, I can deal. Okay, we're going into the basement. Oh, my gosh, they're just hanging out!
In the basement, staff are rushing around in nursing scrubs while dozens of pigeons perch and fly just over their heads. A speaker is playing meditation music - who it’s for, I don’t actually know.
Tristan Higginbotham: Last year we did over 11,000 patients. Over half of them were pigeons.
Tristan took me to the spot where they keep the collision victims. Along the walls are rows and rows of plastic bird carriers.
Taylor Quimby: Oh my gosh. Wow. This is like…
Tristan Higginbotham: Welcome to our little songbird hallway.
Taylor Quimby: So this is like a very long walk-in closet. And it's draped with branches and there's…
Tristan Higginbotham: We get a lot of stressed out birds in here, especially these guys, these mourning doves or even migratory woodpeckers. They fly up and they will hit their head. So we had to cushion. It's like a mattress topper stapled to the ceiling. Um, for head injuries. We don't want any more of those.
Right now it’s just morning dove city, it’s like the most we’ve ever had at one time.
Taylor Quimby: So these are all just mourning doves here?
Tristan Higginbotham: All mourning doves, this is a house spirit.
[mux]
Some of these bird’s injuries are what you’d probably expect for flying into a window: scalped heads, broken breaks. Eye injuries.
But there also the concussions. Sometimes birds appear dazed. Just standing there, like statues.
Tristan Higginbotham: These museums did this amazing study where they got a bunch of window collision specimens and, you know, did a necropsy on them. And they all have just the worst, like, brain damage and like, their skulls cracked in multiple places. This is really, like, obviously gory and sad, but, um, so the most we can do hands off, dark, quiet, medicum, which is just bird ibuprofen, anti inflammatory for like, swelling. And then we wait.
I get the impression that Tristan is very well suited for this work. Emotionally. I’m sure things do get pretty gory - but it feels more hopeful than what the Project SafeFlight volunteers do. Whereas Melissa is the EMT slash bird hearse, shuttling the dead and photographing them for her Instagram account… Tristan is the healer who gets to nurse them back to health.
Tristan Higginbotham: So I get to see the worst part, you know? But I also get to see kind of the best parts, and that's like releasing them or watching a bird that came in, you know, on death's door where, like, he's not going to make it, make it and then be released. Um, so that that's what keeps you going.
[mux]
Ever since my morning patrol of the World Trade Center, I too have found myself slowly going down the dead bird rabbit hole.
I keep bringing up the statistics in conversation. I catch myself evaluating windows, or looking for feathered bodies on sidewalks. And I’ve been checking the app - Birdcast - to see how many millions of birds are migrating every night.
Taylor Quimby [field tape]: Okay… I did not get here very early, it’s 8:40.
My apartment is a five minute walk from the Brady Sullivan Tower. It’s got big glass windows, and at 20 floors, It’s the second tallest building in New Hampshire.
Taylor Quimby [field tape]: I guess we don’t have very many tall buildings.
A couple weeks ago I decided to do a loop before work.
Taylor Quimby [field tape]: Doing the check…
As I walked up a little bundle caught my eye.
Taylor Quimby [field tape]: I see… something. I don’t think that’s a bird though. Oh no it is! Oh my gosh. Oh my god there’s another one. Oh my god there’s another one, holy [bleeped].
That’s three… Oh my god, this is the head of a woodcock. This is an American woodcock. Uh… oh, here’s another head.
Yeah, they’re ahhhhh… they’re all decapitated.
Turns out, Brady Sullivan Tower is home to a family of peregrine falcons. There’s even a livestream of the nest you can watch. And peregrine falcons are known for being able to decapitate their prey mid-flight, in seconds.
So in a weird way, the heads I found are actually part of a dead bird success story. Peregrine falcons were removed from the endangered species list in 1999.
But who's to say these birds didn’t hit the glass first? Or get concussed and make for easy prey?
The point is, it’s just like Katherine said. Once you start to see it, you see it everywhere.
So what can you do but keep looking?
Melissa Breyer: Like every every bird is a win. If I just done one bird for all of this work, it would have been worth it. So that's my take. All these early mornings are worth it, no matter how depressing it is.
Nate Hegyi: That’s it for today’s episode. You can let us know what you think - our email is outside/in radio dot org. If you’re new to the show, you can subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, the iHeart radio app, or wherever you like to listen.
Taylor Quimby: If you’re interested in helping to document building collisions, you can get in touch with your local audubon society, or use a special app that’s collecting citizen science data - you’ve heard of Ebird? Well this one is called Dbird. And it’s the easiest way to go down the dead bird rabbit hole - we’ll put a link in the show notes.
Nate Hegyi: Also, Katherine Chen of the New York City Audubon says that - no matter where you live - if you too are occasionally hearing the thump of bird on glass, there are things you can do.
Katherine Chen: You can get things like, again, tempera paint. It's pretty cheap and pretty effective. Um, if you have window screens, those are great.
Taylor Quimby: Outside/in was produced, reported, and mixed this week by me, Taylor Quimby.
Nate Hegyi: It was edited by Rebecca Lavoie, with help from me, Nate Hegyi.
Taylor Quimby: Our staff includes Felix Poon and Justine Paradis.
Nate Hegyi: Taylor Quimby is our Executive warbler.
Taylor Quimby: Rebecca Lavoie is NHPR’s Director of On-Demand birdpods.
Nate Hegyi: Music in this episode from Blue Dot Sessions.
Outside/In is a production of NHPR.