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A new study finds that while smaller buildings cause fewer bird deaths than do bigger buildings, larger buildings in rural areas pose a greater threat to birds than if those same-sized buildings were located in an urban area.
About one billion birds are killed every year when they unwittingly fly into human-made objects such as buildings with reflective windows. Such collisions are the largest unintended human cause of bird deaths worldwide - and they are a serious concern for conservationists.
In the study, published in the journal Biological Conservation, researchers monitored 300 buildings of varying size and environmental surroundings for bird mortality at 40 college and university campuses in North America in the autumn of 2014, including six buildings on the University of Washington's Seattle campus. They designed a standardized monitoring protocol so that the field crews documented bird mortality uniformly.
In all, they documented 324 bird carcasses of 41 species. At each site, somewhere between zero and 34 birds met their feathery demise.
"Consistent with previous studies, we found that building size had a strong positive effect on bird-window collision mortality," the research team wrote in a statement about the continent-wide research. "But the strength of the effect on mortality depended on regional urbanization."
Why is that? The researchers think it might be related to how birds select habitats during migration, and differences in bird behavior between urban and rural populations. For example, they wrote, forest-adapted birds often select rural habitats with lots of open space and fairly few impervious surfaces over more urban areas. Lighting patterns may also play a part. Lights from large, low-rise buildings in rural areas may act to attract migrating birds in what the team dubbed a "large-scale beacon effect," where this effect may be "more diluted among large buildings in urban areas."
Another theory is that urban birds may actually learn from "non-fatal" collisions and gain "new anti-collision behaviors" that help them avoid colliding with windows in urban areas. Previous research, they noted, "suggests that the relatively large brain size in birds makes them primed for learning."
The results, according to a news release from the University of Washington, suggest that measures taken to prevent bird collisions "should be prioritized at large buildings in regions of low urbanization throughout North America."
(ASIA PACIFIC DAILY)
