We have the term "defenestration" meaning to throw someone or something out a window. It's related to the French word for window, which is fenêtre. We don't have the word *infenestration* as far as I know. If we did, it would mean to collide with a window. People do it, and birds evidently do it a lot.
Twice over the last few days, birds have crashed into our new porte-fenêtre. I guess the big expanse of glass isn't visible to them. I have a feeling these are young and inexperienced birds. The first one was, if I remember, a little tit or mésange. It sat stunned on the deck for a few minutes, and then flew away.
Yesterday it was a bigger bird, a woodpecker, that smashed into the window. It was killed. Now this isn't a new phenomenon. Birds often collided with our old, divided-light porte-fenêtre too. The little wooden dividers between all the panes of glass didn't deter them. Here's a web page that details the extent of the window-collision problem worldwide.
Even though they should know better, people do that too!
ReplyDeleteSuch a shame, to see a beautiful bird dead.
ReplyDeleteI suspect you will get it happening more often now, because of the large planes of glass.
Sad sight... this is a juvenile male Greater-spotted Woodpecker...
ReplyDeleteit would have been flying into the mirrored version of the space it had just left.
The collisions are a by-product of our lifestyle....
the LPO sell UV-reflective decals that are quite attractive...
but nothing is going to entirely stop collisions...
birds often glance off windows and walls if being chased...
they get blown hard against windows and walls in violent gusts...
and no form of bird scarer/make-awarer will stop that!!
We are almost all glass downstairs and have only had two fatal collisions in the three years we've been living over here....
like you we had collisions with the windows over in the longére that are small pane windows...
none fatal to our knowledge...
but a weakened/stunned bird is always vulnerable...
However, the birds use the plate glass windows far more than collide with them....
everyday we are treated to the sight of warblers, tits and black redstarts hovering in front of us....
and flycatching from the glass...
and before this house was completed, but with the windows and doors in place....
the black redstarts nested in the comfort of a huge double-glazed nestbox!!
The BTO and the RSPB have called that study refered to in the link above into question...
apparently it was funded by a glazing manufacturer who was marketing a non-reflective glass...
and it mainly involved counting the dead birds found in gardens within a certain distance from windows...
without fully investigating the cause....
and then extrapolating the result.
It apparently would result in almost no birds in North America after about ten years....
but that is not to say that our modern windows are not dangerous...
but so are domestic windmill generators [or bird mincers as I term them] because they rotate so fast in comparison with the huge commercial ones....
a wire trellis or wire mesh fence that is nice and green and invisible is also deadly to a fast flying bird...
as Susan blogged yesterday, habitat destruction is a far greater killer of birds, insects and mammals.
And to throw too great an emphasis onto one particular cause...
diverts attention away from the fact that modern technology, agriculture and lifestyle are dangerous to the natural world around us....
we are the killer ape!
I remember years ago in Germany, this happened all the time. People would hang a glass black bird in the window or even simply a cut out black bird of black paper. It seemed to direct the birds away from the windows. Worth a try.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunate :(
ReplyDeleteI once worked in an office building with wide reflective glass panels and my desk was right up against the glass. Pow! Birds would slam right into the window scaring the daylights out of me. Occasionally they would wake up and fly off but not always.
ReplyDelete