This is Outside In, a show where curiosity and the natural world collide. I'm Nate Hedgie. Well, good morning. In the spring of 2024, right around dawn, producer Taylor Quimby visited the World Trade Center Complex in Manhattan. He was there to meet a volunteer. How's it going? Good. How are you doing? Good. Thanks so much for letting me tag along. Of course. I already did a quick circuit just to make sure there were no nocturnal collisions before they got swept up. This is Melissa Breyer. She works in this neighborhood. But this morning, she walked right past her office building, her eyes trained on the ground. How did you discover the program? Well, it was during the pandemic lockdown and everything was so, we're going to go this way, was so tense and hard in New York City. I was getting a lot of emotional relief from looking at birds in Central Park on Twitter during spring migration of 2020 because that was where in peak lockdown. And then a photo crossed my Twitter feed of a bunch of dead birds all on a sidewalk that were all found one morning. And I was like, whoa. So then I just went down the dead bird rabbit hole. My whole Twitter just became dead birds. Melissa Breyer is what you might call a dead birder. She's one of a number of volunteers who look for migrating songbirds that have crashed into glass windows and then plummeted to the pavement. She even documents her findings on an Instagram account called Sad Birding. And look at how beautiful they are. Some of them, they're so unusual looking. Look at a little hummingbird. Wow. Look at that. That was one morning. You're holding one, two, three, four, five birds in each hand and there's another 10 or so on the ground. I found 41 birds that day according to my notes here. These were nine black burnion warblers. Nine of the same bird. It was probably part of a flock if not a whole flock. A lot of people have encountered a dead bird on the sidewalk, but these kinds of collisions are much more than freak accidents. So today on Outside In, we are playing a favorite episode from 2024 in which producer Taylor Quimby is taking us down the dead bird rabbit hole to learn about just how many birds are smashing into our windows and to meet the volunteers and scientists that are doing something about it. But when I tell people about it, they're like, that's so depressing. And I'm like, I know it really is, isn't it? But I just, I don't know. It makes you not want to stop until every building is fixed. This is Outside In, a show where curiosity and the natural world collide. I'm Taylor Quimby. Manhattan at 6 a.m. isn't exactly quiet, but it is unusually devoid of people. And that's one reason the dead birders try to get here so early. The sun has already come up and the sweepers have already been out. So this is like a war, huh? With the sweepers. Well, I wouldn't call it a war. This is Linda Lubella. She's leading me on my first patrol of the morning. Her purple hair is stuffed under a baseball cap with a big bald eagle on it. Plus some of them really are told to clean up right away. They don't want to see the dead birds. Yeah. I'm doing your job, like, you know, I get it. Yeah. Yeah. Linda has been documenting building collisions in New York City since 2019, but the program she's volunteering for, Project Safe Flight, started way back in 1997. It's a cheery name for a somewhat grim operation. In the early days, it was a single woman scanning the sidewalks for dead birds. Today, it is a full-fledged citizen science program run by New York City Audubon. That was your commute. I missed one train in my one minute. It was annoying. A few minutes after meeting Linda, I met her new Project Safe Flight trainee, Githangeli Buttacharji. You can't trust the train. So 18, building 18. Each patrol has a clipboard and a black and white satellite photo of the area that they monitor. The sides of each building are marked 1, 2, 3, 4. This one has all the various buildings of the World Trade Center complex. So the numbered map looks a little bit like something you'd see on a CIA document or a 9-11 conspiracy movie. Birds hit and they pop out about three feet, and then the live ones will immediately, if they can, get up towards the end of the building, but the dead ones are usually out here. Yeah. Okay. Linda and Githangeli walk along each facade, peering into grates and sidewalk planters with flashlights, looking for dazed birds that may have survived. We're walking past iconic places as we do this, Zuccotti Park, the 9-11 Memorial Fountains. After every circuit, Githangeli jots down the time in a few other details. There's a section for environmental data, like what the weather is like, if it's light, average, heavy, the temperature, and then. But of course, they note the number of dead and injured birds, which thus far remains at zero. But if we did stumble on one, Linda would open the Trader Joe's tote bag full of items slung over her shoulder. I have hand sanitizer. I have a cloth to catch the bigger birds. Project Safe Flight volunteers don't just count birds, they collect them. Live ones are placed in paper bags, which are porous so they can breathe. Dead birds? I reuse old sandwich bags, so for the carcasses. Before I know it, we've reached the end of my first patrol. So how many more buildings to go? I don't have the map. This is the last one. Yep. That was it, huh? Yep. I've hit about 5,000 steps for the day, and it's not even 7 a.m. What do you think so far? It's a nice way to start a Friday, but having said that, I haven't found any birds, so I might feel differently once that starts happening next week. Next week. During early migration, like the day in April when I patrolled with Project Safe Flight, documented collisions are often in the single digits. But as things get closer to peak migration, a few weeks later, those numbers can surge dramatically, and volunteers can literally see it coming. They use a website called Birdcast that shows real-time bird migrations, the way acu-weather might show you an incoming thunderstorm. It actually siphons data from the same Doppler radar stations, which don't just pick up precipitation, but also flocks of birds, bats, even swarms of mayflies. The urologists usually discard that as noise. Birdcast does just the opposite. So volunteers like Linda and Geithangeli can look at a heat map of the country and see when birds will be passing through New York City by the tens of thousands. And as collisions do start racking up, the feathered corpses they collect will wind up here. But these are from previous years, so... A freezer tucked in the corner of a conference room at New York City Audubon. Flipping through plastic bags of frozen songbirds is Katherine Chen, the group's senior manager of community science and collision reduction. Can I hold it for a second? I don't think I've ever picked up a bird. Oh, it's so light. Yeah, they're incredibly light. Their bones are hollow, which makes it so that they can fly. But it also means that they are very lightweight creatures. This one's an American Red Star. It was found by Melissa Breyer, who you were walking around with this morning in 2021. So this has been in this freezer for three years? Yeah. We had more, actually. They used to be in the other bigger freezer. Yeah. Birds fly into windows for the same reason people occasionally walk into glass sliding doors. Glass is transparent. The real problem is that birds don't have the architectural context to know better. So I had actually seen a bird collision before, and it was at my family's home. We have a large glass window, and I had been inside the house. I had heard a thump, and I went outside, and I saw this little bird just sitting on the ground, and it was not dead. It was just a little dazed, but it let me pick it up, and at the time it was so bewildered. I didn't know why it was sitting here. I didn't know what had happened. I never figured that out until I learned about window collisions, and then I flashed back to that memory and realized, oh, that's what's happening. In a way, collisions are more visible than the biggest threat to birds, which is habitat loss. But they're also easy to overlook as freak accidents. And let me tell you, that is not the case. So it's estimated that up to a billion birds die in the U.S. alone from bird collisions every year. A billion birds per year from hitting glass. What number dwarfs the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services list of other depressing things birds collide with? Cars, electric wires, communication towers? Aside from habitat loss, the only quantifiable thing killing more birds than windows are cats. Because of all this, it's a well-studied issue. Catherine got her master's studying building collisions. She can tell you that wall-to-wall glass, the kind you see on fancy skyscrapers, is worse than individual windows. Lighting, especially at night, plays a big role. Weather conditions can have an effect. What isn't a big factor, surprisingly, is the height of buildings. When the light hits just right, glass reflects trees and bushes, and attracts birds that are looking for a place to land or forage. So most building collisions happen in just those first few floors. Ironically, it is the combination of windows and green spaces that are luring them into a trap. For a lot of people, at least for me, once you learn about the issue, you don't stop seeing it. So every single time I go outside and I see all the glass and how reflective the buildings are, I just think window collisions. And I never see the city or any other building in the same way again. In other words, this is not just a city problem. It happens in small towns, suburbs, in so many drips and drabs, you never think to add it all together. But every now and again, there are days so bad, it becomes impossible to look the other way. I was trembling. I never shake. I was trembling when I was picking up those first birds, because I was like, what is happening? There are some weeks where it feels like you have no free time. Between work, taking the kids to school, walking the dogs, picking your car up from the mechanic, it's all a lot. I mean, you are tired, you are hungry, and all you want is a good home-cooked meal. But if you're like me, you often turn to the same dinners on repeat. Mac and cheese, tacos, a really boring salad that is mostly just spinach and dressing. You deserve a change that is easy and adventurous. With Hello Fresh, you can cook up bold flavors from around the world without ever leaving home. Our producer, Marina, recently ordered barramundi with zesty cilantro sauce. She said the prep was seamless and the results tasted like something that took a lot longer to make. And that zesty cilantro sauce was chef's kiss. Go to HelloFresh.com slash outside in 10 FM now to get 10 free meals and a free NutriBullet Ultra Plus 2-in-1 Compact Kitchen System on your third box. Free meals applied as a discount on the first box, new subscribers only, varies by plan. Disclaimer, must order the third box by May 31, 2026. This is Outside In, a show where curiosity and the natural world collide. Today we are playing an episode from 2024 where producer Taylor Quimby spent a day in New York City learning about a leading cause of bird deaths. Windows. Here it is. Primary call is a robin and then there's a white thread as barrow in the background that's more of a whistling. It sounds like it's over in that direction somewhere. Just a block away from the World Trade Center is a grove of trees that rise up between an office building and the Hudson River. What I mean this is like a quiet, calm morning spot in Manhattan. Beautiful here. It's really beautiful. That was the white-threaded sparrow. So this little patch is a great... Melissa Breyer has big clear-framed glasses that give her an outliced look and that New York sensibility of someone that's found their calling. She was taking me on my second patrol of the morning when we stopped here to talk about what she calls her bad day. So September of 2021, I had... I saw that there was a high migration alert from the night before. I packed up my bag and got to World Trade Center about 6.15 and I saw birds everywhere on the sidewalk. Usually if you see a couple on a facade you're like, okay, it's going to be a day. But I saw so many birds. And I didn't really have any context for it because I didn't really know this happened. So I was just really in shock. I've seen videos she took from that day. Again and again, Melissa bends down, picks up a feathered bundle and places it in a plastic bag. There are so many of them, it looks fake. Some of them were still alive and stunned. So I was picking up dead birds, putting them in one bag, picking up live birds, putting them in little bags to take to the clinic. The sun started coming up. More pedestrians and passersby were coming and saying, what's happening? What's going on? At that point, once it was lighter and a little later in the morning, around 7, the birds were actively crashing into the windows. So I had all these dead birds from overnight and then all these stunned birds from overnight and then all these new birds crashing into the windows. I think about an hour and 15 minutes, I found almost 300 birds. I probably could have stayed and kept finding birds, but I was really pretty maxed out. And I was carrying 30 injured birds. There's only so many injured birds you can be carrying at one time with two hands. So yeah, that was a pretty bad day. There's a name for Melissa's Bad Day. It's called a mass collision event. And if you type it into Google, you'll see other stories popping up just like it. Fall of 2020, volunteers documented more than 1,000 collisions in downtown Philadelphia. Steven Macy-Jewski collects fallen birds around the city. Sunday, October 2nd, Macy-Jewski. In October of last year, 961 birds died in Chicago, hitting a single convention center. This is not a science project. These rows and rows of birds you see pictured here met their death in Chicago Wednesday night while making their migratory journey to the south. There's a certain weight to these mass collision events. They're like war stories. And you can tell that doing this work means telling them again and again and again. I think a lot of people think what I do is really morbid and don't understand. I'll talk about it with some members of my family. They're like, OK, that's nice. I'm like, but then I found a woodpecker. And then I found a Chuck Wills widow. And they're like, OK, that's nice. In general, when I tell people about it, they're like, that's so depressing. And I'm like, I know it really is, isn't it? But I just I don't know. Yeah, there's a lot of happier things one could be doing. But I feel like this is it's really incredible to see change being made by the data we collect. It's it makes you not want to stop until every building is fixed. If there's a silver lining to mass collisions, it's that they bring a lot of attention to an otherwise overlooked problem. And unlike habitat loss, a problem so large it can make individuals feel powerless. There is a fairly straightforward solution to building collisions. It's dots, lots of little dots. So this this walkway up here. Oh, yeah, it like spans the streets. While we were walking, Melissa showed me a place that used to be one of the worst hot spots on her patrol. It's this glass causeway that connects two buildings on either side of a street. Birds would slam into it and then fall into the oncoming traffic. But if you look closely, you can see there's a little polka dot on it. Oh, yeah, I do. Yeah, it's really hard to see. And when you're up there looking at you can barely see it. But that's reduced collisions here tremendously. So the golden rule is a two inch by two inch spacing. This again is Catherine Chen. She says bird safe dots can be applied one at a time, which sounds tedious, or with a film that adheres them to windows in a regular pattern. Some are thin clear stickers that are nearly invisible. Better if you're trying not to ruin the skyline view of New York. Others are more often visible. And some are more often visible. So this is a very simple way to do it. You can see the difference between the two. If you're trying not to ruin the skyline view of New York. Others are more obvious, like the ones on the big glass fairy building that sits on the Hudson River. You'll start to see they put a high contrast dot here. I think the view was less of an issue here. Yeah, yeah, you're about to get on a ferry. Yeah. Although it still just looks like a design. It looks like a design element. And then there is glass that is designed to be bird safe in the first place. Catherine told me about a building in Hell's Kitchen called the Jacob Javits Center. It was a major bird killer. There were tons of collisions happening there. Google it if you want. But trust me, you could not imagine a glassier death machine than this convention center. In 2014, they renovated the building and they used fritted glass. It's imbued with a ceramic etching that is not only visible to birds, but supposedly helps lower energy bills. We continue monitoring a little bit after that construction was complete. And we found that there was a 90% reduction in bird collisions happening at that convention center. That's great. 90% solid. Yeah. You're never going to have 100% guarantee that no birds will ever strike your building. Sometimes birds actually just fly into a brick wall and that's not even glass. But you can significantly reduce the number of collisions that are happening by taking bird safe actions and mitigating your glass and also turning off your lights at night. Yeah. What kind of resistance do you see from buildings about this? I mean, is it mostly just a money issue? Yeah. Sometimes it can be money. Actually, lots of times it can be money. Retrofitting buildings is not cheap. Bird safe film has to be applied on the outside to work and that means equipment like cranes and labor. Plus, they're just stickers. So every 15 years or so, they'll need to be reapplied. That's why advocates lobbied the city to pass an ordinance requiring new buildings to use bird safe materials from the get-go. It worked. And now legislators are considering a bill that would extend the same principle to state-owned and leased buildings across New York. I want to show you this amazing thing that they did here. Sure. So we have all of these, all of this glass with the dots on it, but they made it an educational moment with these signs. Oh, yeah. It says, millions of birds migrate through New York City each year. We have applied a special film to the glass that makes it visible to birds, preventing collisions. I mean, it just makes me want to cry. It's so amazing. I get why patrolling the streets for dead birds could sound a little morbid. This partially would attract me to this story. But I have learned that is only part of the picture. Because after they send in their project safe flight data, Melissa and other volunteers will sometimes do another loop, just because. Not in hopes of finding more dead birds, but really in hopes of finding survivors. How many bird tattoos do you have? Oh my God. So I think like four, one, two, three, four, five, six. Yeah, they've taken over my life in kind of a beautiful way. This is Tristan Higginbotham, Songbird Supervisor at the Wild Bird Fund. The Wild Bird Fund bills itself as the only wild animal rehab center in all of New York City. And when volunteers do find surviving birds, this is where they end up. How long have you been here? Five years. Were you here the day that Melissa picked up like 300 birds? Melissa Bryant. Wait, is that who you? Oh, love her. Yeah. She's a hero. Yes, I was. Yeah. It's really intense. And yet, the vibe here could not be more different. No quiet mornings and clipboards. This has all the chaos of a pet store turned emergency room. There's a turtle tank, squirrel crates, a quarantined area for birds suspected of having avian flu. They do surgeries in a room smaller than my bedroom closet. Okay, down here we've got some birds flying. So just... That's fine. I can deal. Okay, we're going into the basement. Oh my gosh, they're just hanging out. They just did a big release yesterday, I think like 30. In the basement, staff are rushing around in nursing scrubs while dozens of pigeons perch and fly just over their heads. A speaker in the corner is playing meditation music, who it's for I do not know. These incubators are full of pigeons. Last year we did over 11,000 patients, over half of them were pigeons. So this is where the pigeons live. Tristan took me to a spot where they keep collision victims. Along the walls are rows and rows of plastic bird carriers. Oh my gosh, wow. Welcome to our little songbird hallway. So this is like a very long walk-in closet. And it's draped with like branches and there's... We get a lot of stressed out birds in here, especially these guys, these morning doves or even migrators, woodpeckers, they fly up and they will hit their head. So we had to cushion, it's like a mattress topper, stapled to the ceiling for head injuries. We don't want any more of those. Right now it's just morning dove city. Like we have so many. I think this is like the most we've ever had at one time. So these are all morning doves right here? All morning doves. This is a house sparrow whose... Some of these birds' injuries are what you'd probably expect for flying into a window. Scalped heads, broken beaks, eye injuries. But there are also the concussions. Sometimes birds appear dazed, just standing there like statues. These museums did this amazing study where they got a bunch of window collision specimens and you know, did a necropsy on them and they all have just the worst like brain damage and like their skulls cracked in multiple places. This is really like obviously gory and sad but so the most we can do. Hands off, dark, quiet, medecam, which is just bird ibuprofen, anti-inflammatory for like swelling and then we wait. My brief time touring the World Bird Fund. I got the impression that Tristan is very well suited for this work. Emotionally. I'm sure things do get pretty gory but somehow it feels more hopeful than what the project Safe Flight volunteers have to do. Whereas Melissa Breyer is like an EMT slash bird hearse, shuttling the dead and photographing them for her Instagram account. Tristan is the healer who gets to nurse them back to health. So I do a lot of the releases too so I get to see the worst part you know but I also get to see kind of the best parts. Watching a bird that came in you know on death's door where like he's not going to make it, make it and then be released. So yeah it's just hanging in there because at the end of the day it's for them you know. Ever since my morning patrol of the World Trade Center, I too have found myself slowly going down a dead bird rabbit hole. I keep bringing up statistics and conversation. I catch myself evaluating windows while I drive by or looking for feathered bodies on sidewalks. And I've been checking the website, Birdcast, to see how many millions of birds are migrating above me every night. Okay, I did not get here very early, it's 8.40. My apartment is a five minute walk from the Brady Sullivan Tower. It's got big glass windows and at 20 floors it's the second tallest building in New Hampshire. Because we don't have very many tall buildings. So a couple weeks ago I decided to do a loop before work. Doing the check. And as I walked up, a little bundle caught my eye. I see something. I don't think that's a bird though. Oh no it is. Oh my gosh. Oh my god there's another one. Oh my god there's another one. Holy shit. That's three. Oh my god this is the head of a woodcock. This is an American woodcock. Uh, oh here's another head. Yeah, they're all decapitated. Turns out Brady Sullivan Tower is home to a family of Peregrine Falcons that nest at the top of the building. You can even watch a live stream 24-7. Peregrine Falcons are known for being able to decapitate their prey mid-flight in seconds. So in a weird way, the heads that I found are actually part of a dead bird success story. Peregrine Falcons were removed from the endangered species list in 1999. But who's to say these birds didn't hit the glass first or get concussed and make for easy prey? The point is, it's just like Catherine said. Once you start to see it, you see it everywhere. So what can you do but keep looking? Like every bird is a win. So that's my take. All these early mornings are worth it no matter how depressing it is. That's it for today's episode. You can let us know what you think. Our email is outsideinradio.org. If you're new to the show, you can also subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcast, the iHeart radio app, or wherever you like to listen. If you're interested in helping to document building collisions yourself, you can get in touch with your local Audubon Society. There is also a special app, Nate, that is collecting citizen science data. You've probably heard of eBird, right? No. Okay, well eBird is a very popular app for bird data. But there is also a website called dBird. And dBird is for recording the dead birds that you find. I think this is the easiest way to start going down the dead bird rabbit hole, so we'll put a link in the show notes. Also Catherine Chen of the New York City Audubon says, no matter where you live, if you too are occasionally hearing the thump of birds on glass, there are a few things you can do. You can get things like tempura paint. It's pretty cheap and pretty effective. If you have window screens, those are great. Outsidein was produced, reported, and mixed this week by me, Taylor Quimby. It was edited by Rebecca LaVoy with help from me, Nate Hedgie, your host. Our staff also includes Felix Poon, Marina Hanky, and Justine Paradis. Taylor Quimby is our executive warbler. Rebecca LaVoy is NHPR's director of On Demand Bird Pods. Music in this episode is from Blue Dot Sessions. Outsidein is a production of NHPR. Do you want the truth about the organic food on your plate? Then check out the Chart Topping Real Organic podcast. Recently named one of the best climate podcasts by Earth.org, it's hosted by Dave Chapman and me, Linley Dixon. Each week we feature eye-opening interviews with farmers, scientists, authors, and journalists to uncover the forces reshaping the food system from why corporate lobbying is redefining what organic means to how organic farmers are fighting back. So don't miss it. Follow and listen to the Real Organic podcast wherever you get your podcasts. 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