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Stopping windows from killing birds And no, this is not an attack on Microsoft.
Via the Architect’s Journal, news of a new kind of glass, which looks just like regular glass to us humans (i.e. we see right through it), but which looks entirely different to birds …:
… and stops them flying into it.
They tried things like stickers on the glass, but although irritating to humans, the birds paid no attention to them. Just flew into the glass “around” them, presumably.
Makes a nice change from wind farms. But, this Guardian piece on the subject is very odd. The headline above it goes “Wind myths: Turbines kill birds and bats”. The piece itself describes how wind turbines kill birds and bats. Can a “myth” also be true?
But it does also say this:
According to the CSE, for every bird killed by a turbine, 5,820, on average, are killed striking buildings, typically glass windows.
So glass windows have been slaughtering birds on a far grander scale than wind turbines, and for far longer of course, and will mostly continue to do so. However, glass windows are very useful.
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I loved the parting shot about glass windows being useful, the obvious implication being that wind turbines are useLESS.
Am I the only person who is a bit suspicious when these things are going round when there isn’t the faintest whisper of wind? It appears to me that, rather than generating it, they might actually be consuming electricity, just to make it look as though they are working.
Or do I need to invest in a new tinfoil hat?
My understanding is they do indeed contain motors to cycle them up to operating speed. Below a certain wind-speed these motors will consume more power than the turbine itself will generate, so the turbine is locked in the stationary position and blades are “feathered” into the wind.
I suppose it is conceivable that the nefarious could use these motors to make the turbines look more productive than they really are – although I’ve never heard of such a thing.
Another possibility is that there was wind 80ft up that you could not feel on the ground.
I saw what birds were really like when I watched the documentary about them that a director named Hitchcock made several years ago.
Less of those malevolent creatures lurking around just waiting for their chance to attack doesn’t bother me.
Apparently, I was not thinking of the correct birds.
Cheers
“Another possibility is that there was wind 80ft up that you could not feel on the ground.”
From flying model rockets I can tell you I have frequently stood in a moderate wind blowing east while watching my rocket, on a parachute a few hundred feet up, go south west. It is really amazing how different the wind can be not very far up.
Wind turbines kill 5620 times fewer birds than windows and buildings? Why not 5621? Is there the equivalent of the CRU for the counting of dead birds? Do they have roving vans, examining the sidewalks next to large buildings for bird carcases?
K does raise an interesting point there. If windows kill birds then pavements outside tall glass buildings should be littered with dead birds with bent beaks. Which they’re not.
They’re all gathered up by a special squad in the dead of night and sold to fast food chains… Albatross! Gannet on a stick!
In the holly tree outside my bedroom lives a chaffinch. I call him ‘mad Jock McChaffinch’ since, every morning in the breeding season, he wakes at the crack of dawn, spies his reflection in my bedroom window and proceeds to shout, in chaffinch obviously, ‘Oy!! You looking at me bird! I’ll put the heid onya! Take that Jimmy!’ He then flies head first into his mirror image and repeatedly head butts it. He seems to have survived the experience.
I was going to try cutouts of sparrow hawks stuck on the window, but maybe I’ll try this instead.
On the other hand, my aging prostate has me up about that time anyway, so I’ll probably give it a miss.
As for the 5820 missing dead birds, they are of course virtual birds as predicted by the models.
Kevin—we had a cardinal just like that in the tree outside our kitchen window last year. My then 2 year old grandson used to pull the kitchen stool over by the window and wait expectantly for his “bonky bird” to start smacking into the evil reflection he saw in the glass.
My wife loves birds, and does everything she can to attract and observe them, but even she thought that idiot cardinal was hysterically funny.
I like cats.
How many buildings with windows are there, compared to the number of wind-power turbines?
More precisely, how many buildings with windows that birds fly into are there, compared to the number of wind-power turbines?
Also, how many large, rare birds are killed by wind-power turbines? I don’t think eagles fly into windows much at all.
Such are the superstitions of my country of birth (Wales), that if a bird smacks into your window, one of your loved ones will die within the week, so rare an occurance is it.
Someone is making this shit up. Birds are much smarter than plate glass windows.
In retrospect it occurs:
Couple years back i was living in an apartment way up in a tower. Had the novel experience of watching the birds, swallows I suppose they are, hunting insects. From above. Hell, those guys move. They’re going so fast you can hardly see them. Now the terrace has what are called down here, glass curtains. Great big glass sheets with only a top & bottom frame laid on the parapet edge. From the inside, closed, it’s hard to see the things are there at all. Which is the point of them. And the swallows used to use what remained of the ledge to perch on. Not saying you’d see them arrive of course. just a bird suddenly appearing, as if by magic they’re so quick. Now if a bird was going to fly into a window these’d be the ones to watch. And in all the hours I sat out there. Never a one.
Quite right BIS, I have observed swifts or Swallows flying around the reception areas of hotels I’ve stayed in, in Italy, Turkey etc. There were plenty of windows but only one door and they did a couple of circuits, didn’t bump into the walls or the furniture and exited intact in the twinkling of an eye.
I don’t buy the Windfarm death toll either to be honest, unless they are being sucked into some kind of vortex beyond their control. I could chuck rocks at a Windmill all day and still not hit a blade, and I’m a pretty bloody good chucker of rocks.
Forget reality, whatever it is : you can make a decent bet that these windows will be made mandatory. Looking on the bright side, that will supply all kinds of neat twists on Bastiat for posts titles.
It was watching those swallows(?) gave me cause to think the wind farm accusations might be true.
It was amazing, just how close to the windows the birds flew. I’ve seen them taking insects within inches of the glass. Close enough you could hear the wingtip brush.
But, at least a building’s a stationary object. Think of what the bird’s eye view of a rotor blade would be. (This is a standard navigation problem) If there’s to be a bird/blade intercept, the relative bearing of the blade from the bird’s perspective is constant.* It doesn’t see the blade as a moving object; rather than as stationary object that’s growing larger. And the object isn’t, at any point until contact, in the projected flight path. Even in the final instant the bird thinks it will miss. Much like it treats my window.
And, obviously, if our bird’s hunting insects, it’s continually doing a similar calculation itself. The bird’s moving. The insect’s moving. It doesn’t aim itself at the insect, because to do so it would have to fly a rapidly tightening curve to intercept it. The bird aims for the point in the sky where the insect should be when it arrives & then fine tunes to keep the relative bearing constant.
*I haven’t the maths to do the actual trajectories because a rotor’s following a curved rather than straight path, plus the point of threat to the bird is the point on the blade it contacts rather than the point on the blade with a constant bearing. Don’t think it matters, though. The blade’s only of real interest to the bird during the latter stages, where it enters the cone of possible flight paths. Which is probably only measurable in microseconds
Reading through what I’ve written gives a possible strategy for avoiding bird strikes.
Birds don’t only hunt insects. Birds hunt birds. From the prey’s point of view, a threat is a dot in the sky, grows larger without changing relative bearing. That’s the victim’s view of a hawk’s intercept trajectory.
Counter-intuitively, a transparent rotor with, say, 4″ opaque disks along it’s length, might trigger birds’ threat avoidance reactions, where an apparently solid object doesn’t
And rereading that one’s made me wonder if rotors don’t actually encourage bird strikes. If the bird’s view of an intercepting rotor is of a stationary object growing larger, then to the bird’s point of view, what’s the difference between that & a convenient tree to roost in? Of course, trees don’t usually present a constant bearing unless they’re in the in the flight path, but then birds didn’t evolve for a world with rotors. The question is, how long is a bird’s roost/not roost decision process? If it’s short enough, then a convenient ‘branch’ suddenly presenting itself within the field of view, could have the bird attempting to fly an intercept course itself. Much as it would with a branch swaying in the wind.
bis, I’ve read that one of the problems that wind turbines cause with birds, particulary raptors, is that they can mimic the kinds of updrafts that the birds seek out to gain height.
This video shows a vulture circling as if in a thermal updraft before it gets hit by the blade.
@RAB, if that superstition were true, I wouldn’t have any loved ones left. I have birds hitting my office window several times per week- mostly not hard enough to be fatal, but enough to be an annoyance to me.
As far as the lack of avian corpses littering the pavement, that’s the work of scavengers (and lazy predators).
Well it’s a superstition isn’t it Scooby, therefore not real, and it has to be your home, but my point was that very few birds actually hit windows in a domestic house ( I have no idea what kind of massive glass cube you work in though).
Having, like BIS, watched Swallows doing their amazing thing at incredibly high speeds and confidence, and not bump into things, I suspect that eyesight alone isn’t just all they navigate with. I’ve watched bats at twilight too, they have radar, certain species of birds may have something similar. Watching a flock of Starlings in the dusk sky whirling and swirling in their breathtaking displays, you’d think there would be one Corporal Jones amongst them, a second out of step that fucks the whole thing up wouldn’t you? but there never is.
Not sure if another sense would be necessary, RAB. There’s no overall pattern to the flock. Each bird is following some simple flocking rules as to distance from the other birds. And they do get their Corporal Jones. That’s the bird initiates a turn tight enough, the birds on the outside of the turn, which have to fly faster, stall out & get separated.
I’m not in a massive glass cube, but my third floor office does have a reflective glass windows and has trees outside. I would suspect that the reflections of the trees has something to do with the frequent bird strikes.