Urban Birdscapes

Looking forward to this Partners in Flight Urban Bird Conservation Meeting, Nov 17-18. Check it out for the latest on helping birds in urban environments.

A recent Yale Daily News story highlights recent efforts on the Yale campus to address the birdstrike problem with their glass buildings. Of continuing concern is Yale School of Management’s Edward P. Evans Hall, which has killed hundreds of birds since students have been monitoring the situation over the past few years.  This building has been a known problem since at least 2016, as detailed in this story at the time. Hopefully Yale will be able to retrofit the building with bird safe technologies, as they did with the Harkness Memorial Hall at the Yale School of Medicine (see story on their fritted glass here).

Yesterday, while attending my son’s indoor track meet, I was happy to see a huge bird-safe window at the Ocean Breeze Athletic Complex on Staten Island, NY. Different sized nature and athletic icons are fritted onto the glass on this huge window looking out over the ocean. We are seeing more and more examples of this around the country, but hadn’t seen this project mentioned online before.  The $112 million building, completed in 2015, is silver LEED certified, with some native plantings incorporated into the landscaping as well.

Large window at Ocean Breeze Athletic Complex, NYC.

Fritted bird-safe design on window, Ocean Breeze Athletic Complex, NYC.

I wasn’t able to get close enough for my own photo, so check out a closeup of the window pattern design in the background of this photo posted online or this Twitter shot here.

When I was at Audubon we created some great resources to guide landowners in helping birds and wildlife on their exurban or country yards and property. The best resource was a workbook that I can’t find online anymore, so I’m posting a copy for you to download here.

In addition, we made a poster (below) with some good ideas. Unfortunately the links on the poster don’t work anymore, but you can find the Rural Birds to Help section here at Urban Birdscapes, and you can Google some of the other topics for good info. You can still download the poster or even order hard copies from the Natural Resources Conservation Service (Audubon created these resources for NRCS with an earmark from their budget).

Birdscaping is the art and science of creating habitat for birds.  While the term is relatively new, building bird houses, putting up feeders, and planting trees and bushes for birds goes back hundreds, if not thousands, of years.    

In 1972, Ruth Sawyer Billard coined the term “birdscaping” in a little book entitled Birdscaping Your Yard written for the Conneticut Department of Environmental Protection. The term “birdscaping” does not appear in the text itself, where the process of creating wildlife habitat in residential yards is termed wildlife gardening or landscaping. For the next twenty years, there is scant reference to birdscapes or birdscaping.  While still uncommon, these terms have started to gain currency in the past few years. 

Rodale Press published Birdscaping Your Garden by George Adams in 1994. This guide to creating bird gardens uses the term birdscaping frequently, and refers to created bird habitats as “birdscapes.” In 2000, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Canadian Wildlife Service launched Birdscapes as their quarterly bird conservation magazine.  Due to budget cuts, the magazine was discontinued in 2004, but past issues are still available online.

In the early 2000s, I published an Urban Birdscapes blog, dedicated to the conservation, preservation, and restoration of birds in North American cities.  In the last few years, the term birdscapes has slowly taken off.  A 2004 Google search turned up 835 websites using the term.  In 2008, the same search brought up 21,700 hits, and a search today brings up 806,000 results.

Audubon Birdscapes was a resource I created when I worked at Audubon to help property owners create healthy yards and neighborhoods that are good for birds and people. Birds can thrive in our yards and communities, and with a little extra work, these areas can attract and harbor many more species.  That was the vision of Audubon Birdscapes and Audubon At Home–a world where our yards and neighborhoods are more vibrant, healthier, and filled with native birds.   

Over the past ten years, as the Google results pages show, the word has taken on additional meaning. The American Bird Conservancy defines its own BirdScapes program as dealing with large landscapes important to birds across the Americas. Miyoko Chu and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology published a great pop-up book entitled Birdscapes. Do your own Google search and you will find other uses of the term.

Here at Urban Birdscapes, we use the term to refer to urban, suburban, and exurban landscapes shared by birds and people–especially those that are managed for the benefit of birds. Birds are everywhere, and by recognizing our mutual dependence on the same landscapes, we can more mindfully create Urban Birdscapes that are good for both birds and people.

(This post based on a 2008 Audubon Birdscapes post no longer online, but available at the Wayback Machine Internet Archive (here).

I originally posted this review on 2 Dec 2008 at the Audubon Birdscapes Blog, now offline but available on the Wayback Machine Internet Archive (here).

If your Audubon chapter or birding club is trying to expand its membership and reach new audiences, you should take a look at John C. Robinson’s new book Birding for Everyone.  A birder for nearly 30 years, and an African-American, Robinson has a lot to say about why we don’t see as many Black, Hispanic, or other minority birders–as well as what is needed to reach groups such as these without a strong birding tradition.

Birding for Everyone is almost two different books.  Much of it seems written to encourage members of minority groups to take up birding.  These include great personal stories showing how much birding means to Robinson, as well as a handful of other minority birders that he profiles.  He also includes basic instructions on birding–such as how to identify birds and how to chose binoculars. 

The rest of the book addresses a wider audience interested in promoting birding among minorities.  Robinson’s biggest claim is (surprise!) that we don’t have more minority birders because we don’t have many minority birders–that until there are more visible birders among minority communities, it will be tough to convince members of that community to be more involved with birding.

So how do we get more minority birders–at least a core of them so that they can attract other members of their community?  Robinson gives five main suggestions:

• Home and Parents.  Birding groups need to market birding as an activity that families can do together–and take that message to minority households.
• Schools.  Audubon chapters and birding clubs, as well as individual birders, need to volunteer to work with schools to engage young minority audiences in the joys of birding.
• Community Programs.  Many minority kids and others are engaged in after-school and other community program.  Birding groups need to help develop a birding component to these programs that are already accepted in the community. 
• Public Communications and Advertisements.  We need to craft pro-birding messages targeted to minority communities.
• Role Models and Mentors.  We need to support minority birders and help them as they reach out to their own community members.     

Through most of the book, Robinson focuses on birding–the serious persuit of birds with field guides and binoculars.  There is also a need to promote more casual bird watching and bird-feeding among minority communities.  Casual birding is an order of magnitude more common than serious birding–but minority participation lags behind in this arena as well.  The same strategies mentioned above can be used to attract casual birdwatchers as well.  While only briefly mentioned in the book, the wild bird feeding industry has a potentially significant role to play in this regard.  We need them to take a more proactive role in marketing their products to minority audiences.

One weakness of this book, as with birding outreach in general, is a reliance on the mostly unproven assumption that if only more people enjoyed watching birds, they would do more to help protect them.  However, to the degree that this may be true and in light of demographic shifts that are creating a non-Caucasian majority in the United States, there is the strong possibility that if minority audiences don’t learn to more fully appreciate birds and nature, than we may be faced with even more difficulty in maintaining popular support for conservation programs in the coming decades.

So take a look at Birding for Everyone, and make a greater effort to engage all of our neighbors–no matter what their background–in enjoying, appreciating, and helping birds in our communities.  

Netherlands – Society for the Protection of Birds (VBN) has some great new resources to help conserve urban birds. You will need Google translate or another translation service to read them if you don’t read Dutch, but great info here:

Fact Sheets on Urban Bird Species–includes a calendar of things you can do throughout the year to help each bird, and details on plantings, housing, and feeding options for seven urban bird species, as well as guides for managing six different urban landscapes.

Nature Inclusive Building Toolbox–Including guidance for architects, project managers, developers, and local municipalities.

Greenbuilding Checklist–by filling out a checklist about the characteristics of you building or development, you can get guidelines on how to improve the structure and surroundings for birds.

Again, these resources are in Dutch, but represent some of the best thinking and efforts to integrate birds into the design and management of urban spaces. So well worth some time reviewing with the help of Google translate!

Birds in urban yards and neighborhoods dominated by buildings and tiny yards, patios, or balconies need help finding food, shelter, and water.  Especially if there are large parks, wooded streams, or other patches of habitat nearby, creating additional small patches of habitat or providing food and water can help the birds better survive and move across the otherwise hostile landscape.

Urban Birds to Help are those that are usually common in local woodlands or habitat patches, and that can be attracted and helped by creating additional habitat in a small urban yard.

Click on the name of an urban bird in your area to find the one page fact sheet on how you can provide food, water, shelter, and nesting opportunities for these birds in your small urban yard, patio, or balcony.

Urban Birds to Help

You can make an even bigger impact on these birds if you get your neighbors to help you provide habitat for birds in their yards.  For more information on how to help birds in your neighborhood see the Neighborhood Bird Conservation Workbook.

Traditional suburban yards are dominated by lawns, flowerbeds, foundation plantings, and shade trees.  With a little additional work, they can provide useful habitat for many local birds that need help to survive in suburban neighborhoods.

Suburban Birds to Help are those birds that may be more common in larger local habitat patches, such as woodlands and large parks, but that need help surviving the less hospitable landscapes of traditional yards and neighborhoods.

To help birds in your suburban yard, click on the name of picture of a Suburban Bird to Help in your area to get an attractive and printable pdf handout outlining what the bird needs and how you can provide what it needs in your yard.

Suburban Birds to Help

To better help birds in your neighborhood, work with your neighbors to provide additional habitat for the birds in their yards.  For more information on how to make your neighborhood better for birds, see the Neighborhood Bird Conservation Workbook published by Audubon.  Note that the Birds to Help handouts listed there are no longer available on the Audubon website, but are now posted here at Urban Birdscapes!