National lobbying effort seeks to protect species-at-risk birds killed by windows

A Western University researcher is pitching policies in Ottawa to change building designs to prevent bird deaths, CTV London's Daryl Newcombe has that story.

A researcher at Western University will travel to Ottawa this week bringing dead migratory birds and species-at-risk to show the toll that window strikes are having on bird populations across Canada.

Dr. Brendon Samuels has a research freezer full of dead birds collected from the base of buildings in London, Guelph, and Toronto.

But his grim collection is only a tiny sample from a global crisis.

“We know that birds colliding with buildings is a major threat. It kills as many as 42 million birds per year in Canada (and) billions of birds worldwide,” Dr. Samuels tells CTV News. “But it’s one of the easier conservation problems for us to solve.”

As Canadian cities grow, so does the risk to birds posed by the increasing use of glass as a construction material.

Applying small dots to the glass to serve as visual markers can greatly reduce the number of bird strikes.

Western University has added dots to the windows of 16 buildings on campus, but Samuels says adoption of the simple yet effective solution has been too slow elsewhere in Ontario and Canada.

“Our government has a legal mandate to do something about this. It is illegal in Canada for buildings to kill birds under Federal and Ontario laws. What we need is for those laws to be enforced,” he explains.

Later this week, Dr. Samuels will travel to Ottawa to bring the issue of bird strikes, and some of the rarest birds in his research collection, directly to Parliament Hill.

He’ll also attend the 2025 Annual Bird Display where migratory birds and species-at-risk killed by window strikes from Bird Friendly Cities across Canada will be laid out in a display inside the Canadian Museum of Nature.

Safe Wings Ottawa and FLAP Canada will be sending a joint letter to the Ontario and federal environment ministers urging them to clarify regulatory enforcement procedures and provide incentives to buildings to support the mitigation of bird collisions.

Although several species-at-risk recovery strategies include reducing window strikes, there are no financial incentives to help building owners with the cost.

“What we want the government to do is start enforcing our laws, and to create (financial) incentives,” Samuels explains. “If we’re going to be retrofitting buildings anyways to make them climate resilient and efficient, we might as well be addressing bird safety at the same time.”

A petition calling for enforcement and incentives will be sent to federal and Ontario cabinet ministers this spring.

The Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa will host a layout of birds killed by window strikes on March 13.