Planting seeds

Eric Nyquist

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Building better, for birds
A dead bird near a window might seem like a rare tragedy. Unfortunately, building collisions kill at least a billion birds annually in North America, says Viveca Morris ’15, ’18MEM, ’19MBA, executive director of the Law, Environment, and Animals Program at Yale Law School. Most birds cannot see most glass, and architectural choices make some buildings more deadly. The use of enormous expanses of glass has meant a bloodbath among species whose numbers are already in freefall. “The Yale School of Management has killed many hundreds of birds since it went up,” Morris says, speaking of glass-heavy Evans Hall, which opened in 2014—more than 650 birds at last count.

Through YPS seed grants, Morris and her collaborators at the Yale Peabody Museum and the Yale Office of Sustainability have collected data on collision deaths at the university, surveying more than 50 buildings and identifying the biggest killers. Their program, the Yale Bird-Friendly Building Initiative, has also studied surprisingly effective fixes: subtle, dot-printed films that make windows visible to birds but don’t bother humans. Pilot programs at the School of Nursing and the Peabody’s collection study center on West Campus show the film dramatically reduces deaths. “We were able to get the university to implement a new design requirement to ensure this is dealt with from the start, not later on,” says Morris.

As for Evans Hall, “the building continues to kill very large numbers of birds, because they are really hitting pretty much every surface,” says Morris. A YBFBI test putting film on two façades of the SOM structure showed that this could reduce deaths there, though the findings have yet to be applied to the rest of the building.