An Article by Mark Wight, Chairman and CEO

For as long as humans have walked the earth, we’ve looked to the skies and marveled at birds. With admiration, envy, and a longing for that ability to take flight, we invented ways to emulate the bird’s experience for ourselves. Progress helped us fly, but it also helped us build a world that put our winged friends’ very existence at risk.

Currently, billions of birds are flying across the U.S. during their fall migration. For many of them, this arduous journey south will sadly be their last. Experts estimate that in the US alone, as many as a billion birds will die as they make their way to their wintering habitats, largely due to fatal encounters with man-made structures.

Although collisions with cars, communications towers, and electrical wires factor into bird deaths, the primary culprit is building glass. Since birds can’t comprehend that a window is an obstacle, they fly right at it. Disasters like that, caused entirely by humans, are one of the greatest threats to the avian population, second only behind cats.

At Wight & Company, we know there’s nothing we can do about those feline-induced fatalities, but we recently decided to do our part to protect the birds in our own backyard.

Headquartered in Darien, Illinois, Wight & Company is sited in a woody area along the Mississippi River flyway, a major migratory route for more than 250 bird species. A few years ago, I started noticing birds flying into my office windows. They were fooled by the glass, unable to see my office through the reflection of trees and sky. The deadly strikes weren’t isolated, they were happening throughout the building. As the death toll grew, so did our team’s determination to save them.

Architect Danielle Appello, who witnessed the problem firsthand, developed a solution to prevent these unnecessary bird casualties. She and another team member co-designed a patterned film that, when affixed to the outside face of the windows, engaged the birds’ visual senses, and alerted them to the danger ahead.

Since employing that in-house innovation, countless birds have undoubtedly been saved at our Darien facility. We’re no longer startled by the thump of feathers against the glass. Here, our efforts are paying off, but we know it’s only the tip of the proverbial wing.

The widespread bird-strike problem has been linked to various types and sizes of buildings in both suburban and city settings. A Smithsonian Institution study found that buildings in the one to three stories category accounted for 44 percent of bird fatalities, or about 253 million annually. Buildings of four to 11 stories caused 339 million collision deaths, while towers higher than 11 stories killed 508,000 birds annually.

According to a paper for the American Bird Conservancy (ABC), “most collisions happen during daylight hours or immediately before dawn, with some occurring at night. Mornings tend to be the worst time of day for collisions. During migration, this is because migratory birds that have flown all night stop to look for a place to land and refuel. Those that land in and near cities find themselves in a maze of deadly glass.”

There is a growing practice in cities around the country to turn off high-rise interior lights, as well as outdoor electric signage and decorative lights to mitigate night-flying birds’ confusion. The Building Owners and Managers Association (BOMA) of Chicago has been aggressively promoting a voluntary lights-out policy for years. Ten of thousands of birds find themselves “trapped” in the Twin Towers of Light at the 9/11 memorial in New York City where the numbers are real-time tracked so the lights can be turned off periodically to release the mesmerized migrators.

Since The Migratory Bird Treaty of 1918, migrating birds have been comprehensively protected from human interference by the Department of Interior’s U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. But the future of rapidly declining migratory bird populations is not in the government’s hands, it is our individual and corporate responsibility.

Municipal codes requiring or rewarding benefits for bird-friendly designs are slowly being adopted after making their way through tedious legislative and administrative processes. But architects and engineers don’t have to wait for the passage of laws, they should be designing and employing bird-sensitive practices on their own.

Examples like Studio Gang’s Chicago-based Aqua Tower illustrate the possibilities. With its undulating exteriors, the building was designed to navigate birds away from its windows. Likewise, the vast glass expanses of Chicago’s lakefront McCormick Place were covered with bird-friendly film last year after a public outcry to address a massive problem with seasonal window-strike bird kills.

Built-environment solutions are possible, and the AEC industry should step up and lead the way to design and employ them. Wight & Company is trying to do just that. At the Willowbrook Wildlife Conservation Center, which we designed and are building for the Forest Preserve District of DuPage County, we recently developed a pair of bird-deterrent strategies for the structure’s façade.

The first solution is an intricately designed anodized copper screen that mimics the veining pattern of leaves in the surrounding woods. This screen acts as a physical barrier and runs parallel to the windows on the north and west building façades. The second method is a bird-visible ceramic frit pattern on the window glazing to reduce transparency and reflection using a biophilic pattern in harmony with the natural setting. The fritted glass also reduces the building’s solar heat gain, energy consumption, and carbon footprint.

We’re bringing these and other solutions into our designs because birds matter. Not only are they beautiful muses that can touch our souls with their songs and inspire our imaginations with their flight, but they also play a central role in maintaining our ecological balance. If we had the civic, political, and personal will, we could substantially mitigate this devastation of our bird population. It’s time for the AEC industry to do their part; it’s time to save the birds.