Brian Keating’s property is a refuge for everything from beavers, ducks and mink, and now his home is bird-friendly too.
With all the bird traffic flowing through his Inglewood backyard, Keating’s heart sank every time he heard a collision with his house windows.
“I was getting bird strikes often and it was killing me. I couldn’t live with that. We had to do something,” said the Calgary naturalist.
Every year Keating would put up new silhouettes of falcons on his windows but that wasn’t working.
“You need a pattern that breaks up the size of the window reflection and that pattern has to be fairly close together, so the birds understand they can’t fly through it,” Keating said.
So he installed bird curtains. Keating bought a roll of parachute cord that he attached to flashing at the top of his windows. The bird curtains, also known as Acopian Bird Savers or Zen Wind Curtains, can be ordered online. There is also a do-it-yourself option.
“An hour and a half for each window covering, we covered every single problem window on the house. They are essentially cords that hang in front and from the inside. Your brain eventually allows you to look right past them,” Keating said.
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“They’re kind of mesmerizing when you watch them blow in the wind they’ve got a certain appeal when you’re inside. It reminds you that the world is an active world with air moving.”
In five years of patrolling the streets, the Calgary Urban Species Response Team has found about fifty species of birds and bats commonly involved in crashing accidents.
Environment Canada estimates that bird collisions with buildings kill between 16 and 42 million birds annually.
“Since I started birdwatching at age 14 we’ve lost 30 per cent of the total number of birds in North America. I think that’s a huge tragedy not only from just an aesthetic perspective, but an ecological perspective. I can’t imagine waking up and not hearing birdsong. The value for most people is just the joy of knowing the world is alive and vibrant and there’s exciting things out there but there’s the practical aspect, the fact that birds feed a lot on insects,” Keating said.
Over the past two years since he installed the bird curtains, there’s only been one bird collision death at his home that Keating knows of.
“From the inside, watching the wind blow them back and forth, it puts you into that zen mood and it makes you feel even better because you know you’re not killing birds anymore,” Keating said.
In addition to preventing collisions, Bird Friendly Calgary encourages residents and businesses to turn off their lights at night to support birds as they begin their migration starting this month.
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