The headlines wrote themselves, “For the Birds” etc.  But it is seriously good news to see that the USGBC has begun to recognize bird-safe building design as a worthy category of recognition within the LEED framework.

Untold numbers of migratory birds are killed each year flying to the bright lights of night-lit skyscrapers where many become confused and too tired to continue, or are thrown off their path.  And many more die by simply flying into our massive glass facades- whose reflections they cannot “see”, it looks like more sky to them.

Henceforth, projects that  undertake measures with regards to facades and both interior and exterior lighting can receive points via the LEED Pilot Credit Library.

If the measures prove effective the pilot credit could possibly become an official credit within the relevant LEED standards. A small step toward greater recognition of the interdependency between our built and natural environments.

FURTHER READING:
Lights Out New York: Save Energy, Save Birds [8.3.11]
Urban Green Council spoke with Dr. Susan Elbin, Director of Conservation and Science at New York City Audubon, about Lights Out New York.

Photo credit: Claudio Gennari

At least 90,000 birds are killed every year in New York City by colliding with glass in buildings as they migrate to and from their breeding grounds. Many fly at night and are disoriented by illuminated buildings and structures; bright light interferes with their natural navigational cues. To help mitigate this critical problem for birds, New York City Audubon is encouraging New Yorkers to participate in Lights Out New York. From September 1st to November 1st, midnight until dawn, they urge everyone to turn off the lights in city building to save birds and save energy.

Urban Green Council’s Rachel Schuder recently spoke with Dr. Susan Elbin, Director of Conservation and Science at New York City Audubon about Lights Out New York:

Rachel Schuder: Why should someone interested in green building care about this issue?  Is it a really a big problem?

Susan Elbin: Being a green building is not just about being resource efficient in terms of energy consumption and construction, although Lights Out New York certainly does curb energy use.  Being truly green is about taking a holistic approach to our environment, and part of that is conservation of wildlife.  When manmade structures impede the ability of migratory birds to safely pass through or over our city, it is our responsibility to correct the problem. Turning lights out is an easy solution that really does help.

And yes, the problem is a huge.  New York City Audubon’s data indicate that 90,000 birds are killed every year from colliding with glass—a number that we know is underestimated.

RS: How does turning off interior building lights at night help migrating birds?  Aren’t birds more likely to collide with a building they can’t see?

SE: Migratory birds traveling at night are drawn to lighted areas, a phenomenon known as the beacon effect. Combined light emissions from city buildings produce an urban glow, like you see in nighttime photographs from space. Light disorients birds.  It diverts them from their migratory path, brings them lower in the skies, and can cause them to use precious energy. Because most birds actually migrate at night, you can imagine the magnitude of the problem! Birds may collide with lighted windows at night or window reflections during the day.

Once these night fliers come in for a landing and begin to look for food and shelter, they face the daytime hazards of glass: reflections of trees in windows and false passages through glassed-in courtyards and indoor plantings confuse birds and cause them to collide with glass.

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Urban Green Council Executive Director Russell Unger recently spoke with Bruce Fowle, Founding Principal at FX FOWLE Architects about buildings and bird safety – an issue that has been important to Bruce for many years. Research by leading scientist Daniel Klem [PDF] estimates that at least 100 million and up to 1 billion birds are killed annually by collisions with buildings and other man-made structures in North America alone.

Russell Unger: How did you get involved in this subject?

Bruce Fowle: I would have to attribute most of it to my wife Marcia, who grew up in a birding family. She had been asking me for years what I was doing about all these birds that were killing themselves by colliding with glass – “what are you, Mr. Architect, doing about this?” So I had this guilt trip every time I put up a piece of glass. Then Marcia became Executive Director of New York City Audubon, where she then really put the pressure on. She has since served as President of the Board there and has written a book on birding in the New York City area.

I had spoken out on this issue and made myself known as somebody who was concerned about it from the architectural side, and was invited to speak at a Conference at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago in 2005 (Birds and Buildings). The conference was at IIT for the obvious reason that the original Mies van der Rohe buildings were killing birds by the thousands every year with all that glass; they were the first real all-glass or almost all-glass buildings in the U.S. This conference really kick-started the whole movement, which New York City Audubon picked up on and eventually led to the writing of the Birdsafe Building Guidelines under their auspices. Groups in Chicago and Toronto have made similar efforts.

RU: What’s the scope of the problem?

BF: Well, there’s a scientist–Daniel Klem at Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania–who has been doing testing and analysis of this for probably 25 years. Based on rough calculations, he has concluded that a billion birds a year are killed in this country alone by colliding with buildings. Most of the birds that collide with glass tend to be the smaller songbird species – and a lot of these species are already endangered because of loss of habitat, climate change and so forth. Glass buildings are one more factor contributing to their demise.

There are three primary conditions that contribute to this problem: lights at night – which draw birds to buildings or other illuminated features during migration; transparency – when a bird sees daylight beyond or an illuminated tree it can roost on and thinks it can fly right through the glass; and reflectivity – when a bird sees sky or vegetation in the reflection from the glass and flies into it.

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A great survey of the incredibly important efforts to restore Louisiana’s coastal wetlands.

Clemson has constructed a green Coastal Ecology and Forest Science building at a nearby wildlife refuge, taking pains to avoid the pine forest habitat of the local, endangered woodpeckers. Understanding your proposed building site as habitat for local wildlife seems a simple enough idea- but even 10 years ago this sort of consideration was almost totally non-existent. It’s great to see the beginnings of whole system thinking on a more regular basis.

Hat tip to ArchNewsNow.com

An albatross chick on Midway Atoll, raised on plastic that its parents mistook for food from the polluted Pacific Ocean, September 2009; photograph by Chris Jordan.

I first saw this Chris Jordan photograph appended to a New York Review of Books article, A Great Jump to Disaster?, and it struck me as one of the most powerful images I have ever seen. We are very lucky to have three of Mr. Jordan’s incredible large-scale collage images in our office. He’s done a masterful job of developing a process that allows you to feel some of our impacts on the environment that are too large to see.  To continue this work he set out to document the unbelievable scale of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. What he found on the Midway Atoll was myriad Albatross chicks whose parents have fed them plastic plucked from the ocean thinking it is food.  As a result they die.

The entire series of these images from Chris Jordan are available here.

The message is pretty simple: Stop using plastic. Just stop. Don’t buy that bottle of water, or that disposable lighter, or that lunch that comes in a plastic container. Stop today.