154. Birds and Glass: An Important Conservation Issue

Except for habitat destruction, collisions with sheet glass and plastic in residential, commercial, and educational buildings cause the deaths of more birds than any other human-associated avian mortality factor. The toll is estimated in the billions worldwide. Conservation, ethical, and legal reasons justify preventing these unintended and unwanted fatalities that responsible human action can ideally eliminate. This compelling topic has implications for architecture, development, engineering, business and economics, law, philosophy, political science, psychology, and sociology.Our speaker, Daniel Klem, Jr., is the Sarkis Acopian Professor of Ornithology and Conservation Biology at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Among other diverse avian investigations, for 52 years (more than half a century) and continuing to the present, he studies, writes, and teaches about the threat that sheet glass and plastic pose to birds. No other scientist comprehensively has studied and published research results documenting and evaluating the means to prevent this human-associated avian mortality factor. He is motivated by available and growing evidence that bird-window collisions are an important wildlife conservation, building industry, legal, and animal welfare issue for birds and people worldwide. His continuing goal is to make the human-built environment safe for birds. His latest contributions explaining and providing solutions for the window threat to birds is a new book (2021): Solid Air, Invisible Killer: Saving Billions of Birds from Windows, and two recently published scientific peer-reviewed articles in the Wilson Journal of Ornithology: (2024) Evidence, consequences, and angle of strike of bird-window collisions that quantitatively reveals that minimally 1.28 billion to 3.46 billion birds annually are killed striking windows in the U.S. alone, billions worldwide, and (2025) Bird-window collisions: A critical review that offers the most updated comprehensive summary on the topic.To learn more about Dr Klem's work, go to:https://www.pbs.org/video/engineering-bird-friendly-glass-gl4lku/ https://www.danielklemjr.org/ https://www.muhlenberg.edu/birds-and-windows/ https://www.muhlenberg.edu/muhlenberg-now/muhlenberg-bird-glass-collision-research-featured-in-national-geographic/To review Dr Klem's slides from this presentation, go to:https://tinyurl.com/DanKlem-Rotary26