Thousands of dead birds can be found on the streets of New York, every year.
Here's the reason behind their mysterious death...
Here's the reason behind their mysterious death...
Category
🐳
AnimalsTranscript
00:00Most of these birds are flying from Canada to Central America, Caribbean, South America,
00:06some hundreds of miles, some thousands of miles,
00:08and they make it all the way here just to crash into it.
00:12Oh, we have a bird here. It hit a window, came to sit in a tree, and then died.
00:36Poor thing.
00:41Everybody thinks the birds crashed on high, but in the daytime collisions, it's all just
00:50the lower floors. I knew that window collisions were a problem for migratory birds. I knew it
00:57was happening in New York City. I had no idea the scale of the problem until I saw a picture on
01:05Twitter that was a layout of all the birds that had crashed into one building one morning. I kind
01:10of call it New York's dirty little secret. You know how moths are drawn to a light at night?
01:21The birds are the same. Nobody knows exactly why.
01:41I came to the World Trade Center to do my route. It was about 6 a.m., and usually I'll see a few
01:54dead birds here and there, but I walked up and there were birds everywhere. Altogether that day,
02:00I've documented 298 birds, so it was a lot of birds coming through, flying really low,
02:08and so that was one of these cases where it was all nocturnal collisions. It just actually flew
02:13into the building way up high. They saw the light, got confused, they're flying low,
02:20so if the lights had been off, all of these lights have been off, I
02:25would imagine it wouldn't have been the same disaster.
02:38For spring migration, we patrol basically for April and May, and fall migration, it's more like
02:5210 weeks. They've been doing this for thousands of years, flying along this
02:56eastern flyway. They don't know how to avoid the city. It really is up to us to be better hosts to
03:04them. This area, this is like this little railing. It doesn't look significant at all. You would
03:18never think it was a problem, and I found like five birds along this railing. Birds in all those
03:23trees in the 9-11 memorial were flying over to these trees in Liberty Park, and there's also
03:33the whole front of this elevation is a green wall, so it's this green, green, and then they
03:40just see green. This breaks up the reflection and breaks up the illusion that it's clear.
03:54You know, it's funny, if you start looking around at glass lobbies, glass doors,
03:58everywhere they have these little like faint marks at eye level and at child eye level,
04:04like people don't notice, but it's so people don't want to run into glass. It's not just
04:09birds. It's so funny because people are like, well, birds are so dumb, they can't even know,
04:12they don't even know it's glass, but it's like, you look at any lobby down here and you will see
04:17it at human eye level too, and you don't notice it, but it keeps you from walking into glass, so
04:22we need to do the same for birds.
04:36Unfortunately, any city along any of the migratory flyways have this problem. New York is
04:45one of the worst in fall, but there's other cities that are worse. If you know of a building that
04:52seems to be killing a lot of birds to, you know, try to talk to building management, work with a
04:59local conservation agency, there's a lot you can kind of do on an advocacy level, and then on a
05:05personal level, if you have a house that has windows where birds are crashing into, there's
05:12really, really easy home residential solutions that are really important because with a
05:20billion birds colliding with windows every year in the United States, a lot of that's happening at home.