Ghost nets are lost, drifting fishing nets that continue to kill animals
that get entangled in them.



On the Washington State University campus, there is a glass-enclosed walkway
between the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th floors of Heald and Abelson. I work in the
museum in Abelson. The walkway has long provided a steady source of birds
for the museum, one that we would rather not have. It is an indiscriminate
killer.



August 18, I picked up a dead Wilson's Warbler from below the walkway. As I
was entering it into our record book and bagging it for the freezer, I saw
that Dick Johnson and Paul Schroeder had added 2 Wilson's Warblers from
below the walkway, both on August 5. An hour or so later on August 18, I
picked up yet another Wilson's Warbler from below the walkway.



I don't normally check under the walkway for birds; I only pick them up when
I happen to see them. With such a high number of Wilson's Warblers in a
short period of time, I started doing more deliberate searches and trying to
remember to check every couple of hours or so.



This morning about 9:30, I picked up yet another Wilson's Warbler. (They
must be in a migration peak.) About 10:30, I was talking to someone under
the walkway we had said "A bird just fell to the ground behind you." This
victim was a Red-breasted Nuthatch that was still alive, but stunned. I put
him in a covered bird cage in a dark room. I was not optimistic, as most
birds that aren't killed outright in window kills have traumatic head
injuries. I was pleasantly surprised when I checked on him an hour later.
He was one of the lucky ones. He was flying around his cage, not having any
obvious troubles with coordination or flying into the bars. I let him loose
outside where he zipped way up in the air and disappeared.



Not long after that good outcome, I found a not-so-lucky dead sparrow. I
had to carefully compare it with the museum specimens to ID it as a juvenile
Chipping Sparrow.



Dr. Daniel Klem has been researching window-kills and how to prevent them
since the 1990s. He has a website with links to recent research at:



http://www.muhlenberg.edu/main/academics/biology/faculty/klem/ACO/GlassHome.
htm



The research is not encouraging, but the most discouraging aspect of window
kills is the seeming apathy among conservationists. Klem (and others)
believe that, after habitat loss, window strikes are the second largest
human-caused killers of birds. In the US, windows passively kill hundreds
of millions, maybe as many as a billion birds per year.



Turns out, the Heald-Abelson skywalk is the worst possible type of window
situation, namely, it consists of large panes of glass near vegetation.
(The huge glass skyscrapers are not nearly so deadly as windows closer to
the ground at vegetation level.) Worse, birds can see vegetation on the
other side of the skywalk from both sides.



I confess to apathy myself, probably for the same reason most other
conservationists are apathetic to the situation. There is simply too much
glass and too many people adding more glass every year.



Very depressing.





Kelly Cassidy

Pullman, WA