Subject: [Tweeters] Windows: the "ghost nets" of land
Date: Aug 24 20:55:49 2010
From: Guy McWethy - lguy_mcw at yahoo.com


Here you go.
Window coatings to make them more visible to birds, but invisible to humans ...

http://www.geekosystem.com/ornilux-glass/

Guy McWethy

Renton, WA

mailto: lguy_mcw at yahoo.com

--- On Tue, 8/24/10, Kelly Cassidy <lostriver at completebbs.com> wrote:

From: Kelly Cassidy <lostriver at completebbs.com>
Subject: [Tweeters] Windows: the "ghost nets" of land
To: tweeters at u.washington.edu, "'Inland NW Birders'" <inland-nw-birders at uidaho.edu>
Date: Tuesday, August 24, 2010, 6:29 PM












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

?






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