1 week Ago
Logan • If you’ve ever stayed at Utah State University’s on-campus inn, you may have noticed: It’s a death trap for birds. Aspen Lovell knows it. As a student employee who works in an office in the inn’s basement — below a wall constructed of expansive mirrored glass windows — she said she weekly finds dead birds on the sidewalk outside the entrance when she arrives for work.
“You see guts and stuff like that,” Lovell said. “We have cats on campus sometimes and they’ll come by and just eat them. So, sometimes you’ll have like half of a bird there.
Not a great start to the morning.” Two Utah State University professors wanted to change this. And for a while, they did.
The solution came from a first-of-its-kind experiment led by Kimberly Sullivan, who taught ornithology and wanted to reduce bird collisions on campus, and Mark Koven, who teaches technology, development and technical education and had done research in ultraviolet light. They came up with the idea to install poles outfitted with ultraviolet lights aimed at the inn’s “bird death zone” windows. Unlike humans, most birds can see ultraviolet light.
When this light is projected onto windows, it makes the glass appear more like a solid surface and less like a reflection of the sky or surrounding trees. And Lovell said the idea worked. Between May and November 2023, she said, only a couple of birds flew into the windows — compared to the dozen that typically died each month.
However, once the experiment ended and the poles were removed, the bird collisions began again. “I would rather have that [the poles] than dead birds on the sidewalk,” Lovell said. “I would rather save birds than, like, have more of a ‘beautiful campus.
’” Sullivan has since retired from USU. But she and Koven haven’t given up. ‘They’re ugly’ The lights were intended to be a short-term experiment due to a lack of funding for a sturdier solution, Sullivan said.
She tried to keep them up as long as possible, she said, but eventually, the Logan school’s Facilities department told her they had to be taken down. “It did work,” Sullivan said. “It dramatically decreased the number of birds hitting the mirrored side of the window.
But it was a temporary installation. We just had these poles, which facilities said, ‘They’re ugly. You can’t leave them up.
’” The University Inn is one of the last places on campus that still kills nearly a dozen birds a month, she added — a number that increases during migration seasons. Sullivan implemented other strategies — such as window decals and shades — on buildings across campus. As part of her ornithology course, she required students to walk around and survey the campus’s most dangerous spots for birds, counting fatalities.
This allowed her to collect data on bird deaths caused by building collisions, and together, she and her students developed solutions. One example is a fix designed for a second-story walkway that extends from the Anderson Engineering Building to the Science Engineering Research building. The walkway’s glass walls used to cause as many as 25 bird collisions at once due to the reflection of surrounding fruit trees.
Over the engineering building’s lifetime, Sullivan estimated nearly 8,000 birds have collided with it. Now, thanks to an art installation in the walkway, only a couple of birds are found dead there each year. But as University Inn’s mirrored windows remain a persistent problem, Sullivan and Koven are seeking grant funding to test different and more aesthetically pleasing methods of casting ultraviolet light onto the glass.
Across the United States, more than 1 billion birds die by window collisions annually. “We get so much pleasure from birds,” Sullivan said, “but bird populations are really struggling. It’s overwhelming, and we can’t do that much about it, but we can stop bird window collisions.
” Combining science and design Koven, a professor of outdoor product design, became involved in the project after an assignment he gave his students in 2015 — to design art installations around campus — unexpectedly helped reduce bird-window collisions. Sullivan, who was actively trying to collect data on bird deaths on campus, sought him out after the art was installed and asked if he had any other ideas. Koven, who combines art and science to create real-world solutions, didn’t — until, while giving a conference lecture on the ultraviolet spectrum and how animals perceive camouflage differently, he had an “aha” moment: camouflage windows.
“My theory was you create a barrier of ultraviolet light,” Koven said. “ ..
. When the birds have these lights that are essentially 15 feet away shining on the windows, what they’re seeing is essentially a wall versus a window.” Up until then, there were no studies that had tried his idea.
So he and Sullivan began submitting grant proposals to explore whether it could actually work — and eventually secured internal funding to install the poles with ultraviolet bulbs. “The reason it hasn’t remained wasn’t because it didn’t solve the problem,” Koven said. “It actually really hugely solved the problem.
There weren’t any complaints, there were actually only praises. It just came down to finances and aesthetics.” The pair of researchers just submitted a paper on their experiment for an ornithological publication.
Koven said their next step is to test the concept on as many different types of windows as possible, including industrial buildings and homes, and to work on sharing the idea more broadly. The ultraviolet light poles couldn’t stay up any longer because they had some rudimentary aspects, according to the school’s associate director of planning and sustainability in the Facilities department, Jordy Guth. The electrical wires weren’t buried underground, the poles had to be adjusted often and they were held in place with inexpensive guide wires.
“That mock-up that they had really is not the right thing for anything longer than what they had,” Guth said. “But that doesn’t mean there couldn’t be something else designed.” Currently, she said, facilities staff do have some partial mitigation strategies for the inn, including trimming and removing trees near windows and removing fruit from surrounding vegetation.
These efforts reduce the number of birds in the area by eliminating habitat and food, Guth said. The return of dead birds One employee who works in a basement office at the University Inn said she and her coworkers see up to four dead birds outside their door each morning during seasons when birds are most active. Meetings in one of the building’s conference rooms are often interrupted by a loud “thud” of a bird hitting a window, she said.
While American Goldfinches were active in Logan in the fall, Lauren Cordova, who also works in the basement of the inn, said work became a death zone. “There were multiple casualties,” Cordova said. “The little birds, there’s no saving them.
” An employee in her office has taken upon themselves the role of cleaning up the dead birds to keep the walkway clear for patrons. “It’s devastating,” she said, “to see this happen over and over.”.
