| Description |
<p>As ABC and our partners have made great strides in raising the alarm about bird collisions with glass, we have seen the demand for ABC’s services grow exponentially. This has led us to a two-part strategy: first, we must continue to fight the threat of glass collisions by supporting legislation and ordinances; and second, we must continue to meet the growing demand for our glass testing and as well as advance our guidance on light pollution reduction.</p>
<p>Strategy #1: Reduce bird collisions with glass through legislation and ordinances.</p>
<p>First, we will continue our effort to pass the Bird-Safe Buildings Act. This bipartisan bill would reduce bird deaths by requiring that any new or significantly altered public buildings incorporate bird-friendly designs. Over the years, this legislation has been championed by U.S. Representatives Mike Quigley (D-IL) and Morgan Griffith (R-VA), with Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) supporting the effort in the Senate. Representative Quigley has announced his retirement, so we are now hard at work making sure that this bill will find new support and be reintroduced so that it can be adopted. We are also working to improve the current proposed language of the bill so that it will save even more birds.</p>
<p>Second, we will promote local bird-friendly building ordinances like the one we helped New York City adopt in 2019. We now start ordinance conversations with ABC’s Model Ordinance which requires that new construction and major renovations include bird-smart building strategies. With ABC’s experience in bird-friendly building design, outreach, and education, we believe we can see many new local ordinances created. In the past, we have waited for local partners to come to us to ask about how they might adopt an ordinance, knowing that local voters are what will move the needle. Now, however, we have strategically created a list of 20 target cities and plan to build our own coalitions to see ordinances created and adopted, a process that we hope will be more efficient and lead to stronger ordinances because ABC will have been involved from the beginning.</p>
<p>Strategy #2: Continue to meet the growing demand for our glass testing and advance our guidance on light pollution reduction.</p>
<p>New York City’s 2019 bird-friendly building ordinance is a game changer because it requires every new building, and major glass replacement, to use bird-friendly glass. There were other ordinances before it, but nothing that went so far in a city of this size. The ordinance also explicitly cites ABC’s ratings of materials as the standard to be used for glass, a testimony to all that ABC has achieved as well as something that led us to scale up our ability to rate glass by opening a second testing tunnel at Washington College’s Foreman’s Branch Bird Observatory in Maryland (our first tunnel is at Powdermill Avian Research Center in Pennsylvania). We continue to innovate to create new ways to evaluate glass and other products, developing and continuing to advance both a computer model and a set of product guidelines that, if followed, mean that a product does not need a formal ABC evaluation to be bird friendly – and we will continue to grow our systems with your assistance.</p>
<p>In addition to reflective and transparent glass, light pollution also plays a significant role in window collisions. Compared to glass, lighting’s influence on birds is a more challenging issue to both research and develop collision-reducing solutions for. Regardless of the difficulties this issue presents, reducing light pollution is important and, given ABC’s prominence and our success with glass and building ordinances, we are committed to developing resources around light pollution reduction that will help prevent collisions. We are close to launching new information on exterior lighting, developed with our partner International Dark Sky Association, and with your help we can package these new guidelines and work on seeing them adopted in the coming years. We also plan to assemble a coalition of partners that will develop the first direct approach to systematically reduce light pollution coming from interior lighting.</p> |
| Benefits |
Bird collisions with glass are one of the most significant causes of bird mortality in the U.S., accounting for up to one billion bird fatalities each year. Collisions are not unique to the U.S., they are a global conservation crisis and ABC is one of the global leaders in providing practical, effective, and scalable solutions. We work on multiple fronts to reduce bird collisions, from advocating for collision-reducing legislation, to evaluating potentially collision-preventing glass products to educating architects, developers, and homeowners, and much more. Our work saves birds, educates people, and advances progress towards a future in which glass is no longer a leading threat to birds. |
