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This work has been published! You can read the study here.
How can we make our university campuses more bird friendly?
After creating the UNC Charlotte Audubon Campus Chapter, this was the question at hand. We decided to begin making our campus more bird-friendly by studying bird-window collisions at various high risk sites on campus. During the first season studying collisions, we incorporated the collision monitoring into an Urban Ecology course at UNC Charlotte. The students surveyed all sites throughout the course and several students joined the Audubon Campus Chapter and continued to assist with this research after the course concluded! In total, approximately 50 students have assisted with this research since it began in January 2022.
This map shows the survey routes taken by our volunteers during the first season of monitoring!
What have we found?
We have completed 1,805 collision surveys as of March 2023.
We have found 51 dead birds and one injured bird as of March 2023.
The most commonly found species is the American robin with nine collisions.
Our riskiest site has had 15 collisions.
We have received $15,000+ in funding in support of this research.
We have been featured in three articles regarding this work. See below!
Bird-friendly windows installed on the UNC Charlotte campus!
We are very excited to announce that bird-friendly window clings were installed on the Atkins Library in April 2023 to help prevent bird-window collisions! Throughout this research, we identified this building as being the most deadly for birds. Studying the windows, the middle third of the large window sections (see the photos below) appeared to be extra reflective due to the gray backing - we believe this is the section that was leading to the most collisions. We received grant funding from the Charlotte Green Initiative to support the installation of bird-friendly window clings and campus officials were excited to help. We are grateful to all who have assisted with and supported this project!
This research has received media attention! See below for links to some stories on this work.
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