Pennsylvania Legacies #227: Flight Risk

Episode transcript

Josh Raulerson (00:02):

It is Friday, November 1st, 2024, and this is Pennsylvania Legacies, the podcast from the Pennsylvania Environmental Council. I’m Josh Raulerson. Well, the fall bird migration season is underway in Pennsylvania, and across North America Right now, hundreds of species from warblers and fly catchers to bald eagles and falcons are passing over the commonwealth on their way to winter ranges. With that in mind, we’re returning this week to a conversation. We began back in January about threats that birds face in the built environment, particularly during migration. On the first part of that interview, we spoke with Diane, who’s an astronomy professor at Carnegie Mellon University, and an advocate for what’s known as the Dark Sky Movement. That episode focused on legislation before the Pennsylvania General Assembly House Hill 1803, aimed at curbing light pollution, which can confuse birds and disrupt their migration.

Diane Turnshek (00:57):

Every single animal has been affected, plants are affected, it leaves them stressed.

Josh Raulerson (01:04):

Reduced light pollution is a key component of bird safe cities, but it only goes so far as we learned from Jonathan Rice and Nick Liadis of the Powdermill Avian Research Center in Westmoreland County. On this episode, we’re revisiting my conversation with Jon and Nick from earlier this year to focus on another, arguably bigger threat to birds building collisions in the U.S. and Canada alone. More than a billion birds a year, that’s billion with a B, die after flying into windows. A long running research program at Powdermill, which you’ll hear about in a moment, studies how birds interact with buildings in order to make those structures safer. Bird safe design features are effective, but adoption has been slow, in part because developers and planners may not fully understand the benefits that led to the question of how to incorporate bird safety into other green building objectives. And that’s where we pick up the conversation. These sustainability initiatives that governments at every level are pursuing, you know, often with at least part of the focus on the bottom line in lowering energy costs or using less energy in general. Is that part of these kind of strategic thinking in this movement? Are you trying to leverage larger sustainability goals to, you know, to address this specific issue?

Jon Rice (02:25):

I know Nick and I have had a lot of conversations with folks where we talk about, let’s say, retrofitting problematic windows. And you can look at it from this, putting, applying some kind of film on the exterior of, of the first three floors of your windows may help protect from bird collisions. But it also may, if done correctly, help with solar regulation, with, with energy usage, with mental health of the folks working inside of the building. And there, there ends up being multiple boxes that are checked with one action. And that’s something that Nick and I have talked about where I am coming at it from an avian ecology point of view. And Nick’s coming at it from an avian ecology point of view and a an architecture point of view where we can, you know, discuss the ways that you utilize one action to solve a myriad of problems. And I’ve seen more movement in that direction, more so than just if you turn out your lights, it reduces your overall cost. Because if you’re, you know, multi-million, multi-billion dollar company, they’d rather just stick with the status quo. And a little bit of positive press is often not enough to, to move the needle to get change to happen.

Josh Raulerson (03:39):

Well, when you’re looking for opportunities though, to make, you know, check more than one box, make the case for what you want to have happen on the basis of somebody else’s goals or some related goal, what are I guess, technological innovations that have, have helped that? Cause? What, what’s, what’s changing in the technological sphere, or what do we need to change maybe to, to make these kinds of interventions that much easier and more appealing to the decision makers?

Jon Rice (04:05):

From the window perspective, the reduction in cost to have more specialized windows at the construction of the buildings. So it used to cost a lot more to have panes of glass that had baked in UV coatings that look more or less invisible to the human eye. But because birds have a fourth cone in their eye, they can see in the UV spectrum, they can have these patterns that are visible to birds. So with the sunlight reflecting off the window, it breaks up the reflection and, and becomes much more apparent to a bird. But to you and I, it doesn’t, it doesn’t look all that different. Other kinds of etchings and acid etchings and, and things like that are just becoming more readily available and, and lower cost. And I think more companies are thinking about how their building looks and feels to the people who work there as well.

Jon Rice (04:57):

And then along with that, the aesthetics of what if you’re applying a retrofitted window film, it isn’t just bars of lines that frankly kind of look like a prison cell or just a field of dots that can be somewhat pleasing to the eye, but they’re, they’re becoming more aesthetically pleasing to, to our eye. So if you’re going to be putting something on the window that breaks up the reflection to a degree that is necessary to reduce window collisions through birds, which is sort of a, a finite number of amount of space in between, in, in between the intervention elements, it’s about two inches by two inches, that’s becoming more appealing as well. So what you’re buying to put on a window, again, it looks better for people either passing by or the people working in the building. So a company or a building owner is more likely to put money towards putting something on the building that doesn’t make it look necessarily ugly. That’s specifically from the, the window point of view. But there’s all new forms of like art architectural design that deal with environmental safety and bird safety. And, and Nick deals with that a a lot more. So I’ll let Nick talk about that,

Nick Liadis (06:06):

Where to where to start with this conversation? So yeah, Jon mentioned that there are retrofit products that can be applied to Windows that can help break up those reflections. Those tend to be kind of the quick and dirty, like, we need to get something on these windows because collisions are happening and we need to solve this problem, like, right, right now. But this idea about how to design a bird safe building can allow the bird safe intervention to be integrated into the design language of the building. So it doesn’t necessarily have to be it’s not necessarily going to scream like, oh, pattern on the window. They’re trying to protect the birds, right? You can think about the design intervention is helping the envelope of the building thermal regulate. You can think about the screens that might go over top of the window as part of design language.

Nick Liadis (06:58):

Certain patterns might pick up on patterns that appear in other elements across the building. So there are a number of ways of thinking about bird safe intervention, not just as a 2D pattern applied to the windows, but something that might actually be kind of spatial and three dimensional and help shield those windows, be something aesthetically pleasing, create an experience in the building while also helping the building to deal with solar heat gain and other kind of thermo-regulatory things. And then also it’s shielding the window and protecting the birds from detecting the reflections of their habitat in, in, in the glass. So there really is a lot of opportunity to, to expand this definition of a bird safe building. It’s not just a, a building that has a, a pattern of dots across the glass. It can be so much more than that.

Josh Raulerson (07:56):

You guys are too modest to acknowledge it, but I’m pretty sure a lot of this is coming directly out of research and product testing that you’re doing at Powdermill. For, for anybody that hasn’t been there, they, they should just to, to, to see the setup. But can you kind of describe it how, how you actually test glass and the, maybe the role you play in this industry nationwide?

Jon Rice (08:14):

Sure. So Powdermill Nature Reserve is a field research station owned by a Carnegie Museum of Natural History. It’s been in operation since about 1958. 1961, our bird banding operation began, sort of as it is today. All bird banding is done under federal permits through the USGS. We use about 65 mist nets, which are, if you imagine sort of a short volleyball net, but the holes in the net are a lot smaller. And across the net, there’s a number of pulled tight lines with sort of slack net in between. And so those create these little pocket troughs that as the birds are moving in between the, the shrubbery or the vegetation, they hit the net and they slide down into the trough. And then we have avian scientists that monitor the nets regularly. They go around, they remove the bird from the net, bring it back to a lab where the birds are banded with a small aluminum band that has a u unique code on it that identifies that individual.

Jon Rice (09:23):

Then we take a, a myriad of measurements related to the bird: its wing cord length; we age and sex the bird, measure its fat reserve levels while we have the bird in hand, as I mentioned before, depending on the species, the age, the condition that the bird is in, you know, let’s say, like I was describing earlier, if it has a, a really large amount of fat reserves, we might also perform some other forms of research on it related to specific associated research projects that are not sort of long term, maybe short term, putting like a radio tag on it to, to study where it’s moving individually after it leaves the banning lab. We band roughly 10,000 birds a year. A small subset of those birds of the, that 10,000, again, depending on age, sex, condition, are set aside. And instead of being released immediately from the bird banding lab, they’re taken next door to the bird banding lab where we have a flight tunnel. So if you imagine a cargo crate or like the back end of an 18-wheeler, roughly that size and shape. One end has an opening; the other end has a mist net pulled tight, and then two panes of glass, one control, one experimental. And there’s more to it than that. But basically what we do is we record with a video camera, every flight and a bird is released in one end of the t flight tunnel. It flies down the tunnel towards the open window or the, the light at the end, which is, has two panes of windows or two panes of glass, as I mentioned. There’s a mist net pulled tight so that the bird don’t, in fact hit the window. They are, they’re protected from hitting the window, and then there’s a small door that we open and the birds are able to fly out and, and return to, to the wild

Josh Raulerson (11:10):

With the story to tell, I guess, to their friends.

Jon Rice (11:12):

And so what we do is then we look at the, the recording frame by frame, and we can watch the bird’s decision making as it moves down the tunnel. And there’s a, a motion sensor light that goes off when the bird hits the net, so we know exactly the point at which the bird hits the net. So if it’s flying towards the experimental pain, and at the last minute banks towards the control pan, we can see that where it hits the net when the light turns on frame by frame. And so we can identify decision making of birds, avoiding the experimental paint of glass, 80% of the time, 90% of the time, whatever that number is, those statistics go to American Bird Conservancy who contracts us to do the work. And then they use our numbers, our measurements to determine the collision rating that they give all of the products that they host on their website.

Jon Rice (12:05):

And that is both physical two dimensional interventions, like, like Nick mentioned earlier, as far as like films or, or dots, as well as things from glass manufacturing companies where they’re baking in products, whether that’s on the first surface or second or third. Some of these, some of these windows have four or five panes of glass in them. And so they’ll put the treatment on different surfaces from the outermost surface of the window in and then moving inwards. And so our research helps them to understand how far into the window one of these treatments can be applied while still maintaining effectiveness. And so there, there’s a lot of different things that go on. We test, I don’t know, somewhere between maybe 10 and 20 products a season or a year. It really depends on the number of birds that we have, how many usable flights that we have, because as a scientific institution, we review each flight and re remove flights that, that, you know, whether it’s the improper lighting or the bird, instead of flying down the tunnel just flew and landed on the ceiling <laugh>, you know, and then we have to open the door and they just fly out. And that’s, that’s not a usable flight. So depending on a specific experimental product has to have so many usable flights for us to determine its effectiveness.

Josh Raulerson (13:26):

Are there a lot of other facilities doing this kind of research, or is it just you guys?

Jon Rice (13:30):

There’s a handful. So American Bird Conservancy really designed this protocol out of the Bronx Zoo, and then contracted us to build a flight tunnel. And, and we’ve been doing it. And they recently built another flight tunnel at Foreman’s Branch Bird Observatory in Maryland. And so we’ve been working in tandem with them just to increase the amount of experimental products that can be, can be put through. But there’s other institutions that have been doing similar styles of work, researching avian perception of glass, more or less. Scott Loss at Oklahoma University, I believe, has been doing an immense amount of work over many, many years. Daniel Clem at Muhlenberg College started this type of work back in the late seventies, early eighties, where he was hanging panes of glass in the forest. And his measurements were the number of birds colliding with the windows. We’ve chosen to go a different route where bird mortality isn’t directly related, but there’s a lot to be said for the fact that we have those interventions that protect the birds, and that is different than what they encounter in the real world. So we are a little more skewed towards a lab experiment as opposed to a real world experiment. But given the amount of birds that we fly, we choose to try to keep them as safe as we possibly can while still gaining as much scientific understanding of their perception of, of glass as possible.

Josh Raulerson (14:52):

But it sounds like if, if I work in a building that has bird safe windows, there’s a good chance you’ve had eyes on them at some point,

Jon Rice (14:58):

Probably at some point. Yeah. We’ve tested, I don’t know how many hundreds of, of interventions over the years. It’s, we have so many experimental panes of glass in our shed out at about it’s ridiculous <laugh>  Nick?

Nick Liadis (15:11):

Yeah. And, and just to kind of mention that, there aren’t that many bird safe buildings out there. So there is legislation about dark skies, and of course, collisions are affected by the presence of light pollution, but we are a little bit behind on getting legislation on the docket that amends building codes where bird, safe glass or bird safe building is, is required. And so for me, it has to be a more comprehensive package, right, for adequate bird safety. The light pollution legislation needs to be paired with legislation that requires buildings to also have bird, bird safe interventions on them. Because the two together can really protect birds when, when they encounter cities, because it’s not like, you know, we shut the lights off, there’s still going to be migratory birds out there. It’s just reducing the likelihood that a lot of birds are going to be coming into the city environment.

Nick Liadis (16:06):

Migratory birds are still going to be present in a city, even if, if legislation is enacted and, and monitored and supervised, that actually limits the, the amount of light out there. But we still need to, to do things about, about bird safe, bird safe buildings for the sake of those migratory birds, but also our birds, backyard birds, like chickadees cardinals, blue Jays robins, these are birds that are, are also still colliding with windows as well. So the bird safe movement really and, and the legislation that could come, come from that really needs to be sort of in tandem and associated with light, light pollution legislation. So we have a little bit of work to do, but you know, there are other cities that require bird safe design. Unfortunately the state of Pennsylvania doesn’t have anything like that yet. Those conversations have started, but we don’t have any kind of bird safe laws in effect like New York City has, or San Francisco or the city of Toronto. So yeah, we have, we have some work to do in that realm.

Jon Rice (17:14):

Well, and as we understand more and more the impact of vegetation in general, but also native vegetation on attracting birds to areas that, that then present these glass fun houses where they, where they get stuck in so often are, are killed within, you know, there’s such a heavy movement to increased green spaces in cities, and that’s wonderful. The conversation around what the green space is made up of is also incredibly important, moving away from ornamental species that are not from here, but species like native oaks that host, you know, 300 to 500 species of important insects important lower story species like spice bush and, and, and things like that in these green spaces that we know wildlife are, are using as stopover. And as that increases, that’s wonderful that we have these refugia for wildlife. But it’s also, like Nick said, if that is not in tandem with making sure that our urban space is safe for wildlife, we’re creating this ecological trap where we’re, you know even with the reduction of light, we know that birds are going to stop over here. We also know that birds just live here. And with the increase in like urban tree canopy, that’s huge for birds. But the problem is, if we’re drawing those birds into that urban canopy without properly addressing windows, the issue remains anywhere that there’s glass

Josh Raulerson (18:42):

Compounds, really.

Jon Rice (18:43):

Exactly. Exactly. You know, I, I think that, you know, light, light pollution bolsters the likelihood of window collisions. And so reducing light pollution is a huge step towards reducing overall collisions. But, but yeah, I think to just echo what Nick said, it’s, it’s only as effective as addressing the source of the collisions, which at the end of the day is glass.

Josh Rualerson (19:05):

Well, this has been a very western PA-centric conversation because all of us are in the Pittsburgh area. But, and, and 1803, I think is the, the, the, certainly the biggest thing that’s happened statewide on this subject. But are, are you guys aware of similar actions other cities have taken other maybe county governments in Pennsylvania? I believe Philadelphia at least has lights out.

Jon Rice (19:25):

Yeah, they have a lights out program. Erie is starting one. Harrisburg is in the works of getting one going. Some universities across the, the state have, have started sort of bird safe lights out programs, all kind of small bits and pieces. There’s, there’s a group of folks that are right now just starting to align ourselves and, and identify how we can regionally across the state, organize ourselves to be more impactful. And you know, Nick brought up building codes, and the issue with the state of Pennsylvania is any kind of building codes are on a municipal level. The state can’t change that across, across, you know, statewide. It has to be on the municipal level. So that’s a whole, that’s a whole conversation that, that we would have to have is, you know, how do we address each municipality to change these, these building codes you know, individually. And so there’s a handful of, of folks doing things, and we’re trying to organize ourselves and strategize to be more effective and impactful across the state. But it’s still pretty new. But other states have, have done this. The state of Ohio has one group called the Ohio Bird Conservation Initiative. And they have, I think they’re up to six cities that they have lights out programs within. So there’s other cities that we can model ourselves after. And there’s certainly federal programs that that help provide resources and organization and, and strategizing help. So it’s certainly hopeful.

Josh Raulerson (21:18):

This is just me getting further and further out of my depth, but like my sort of rudimentary understanding of how building codes work is, it’s like, it’s, it’s codified locally, at least in Pennsylvania. But aren’t they all kind of modeled on some kind of international set of standards? Is that, is there not like an international, if I, does this make any sense? I thought there was like some kind of certifying body that the local building codes are, are modeled after.

Nick Liadis (21:50):

Yeah, there’s the, there’s the, it, it’s called the international, the International Building Code which most yeah, is sort of the, yeah, the where you go for, for building code information. And then municipalities or cities or neighborhoods can choose to amend those in, in any way to fit local, local needs or local requirements.

Josh Raulerson (22:16):

So it’s just kind of a template, but would there be any opportunity to, you know, to address it at that level? Like could the international building code be pushed in that direction in a way that would shake out locally?

Nick Liadis (22:27):

So there is bird safe language in the LEED certification of buildings. So LEED is, is a third party that certifies at various levels sustainability within the built environment associated with buildings specifically in this case. There is a bird safe credit that can be earned, but that’s not a requirement to be LEED or sustainable. So, and it’d be great if that, that that was a requirement for LEED certification, but it’s, it’s not, folks have to opt in for that one.

Jon Rice (23:00):

And depending on your building, it’s often kind of expensive for sure, the value of this, like one credit. And so it, it tends to be overlooked, I think, in, in a lot of cases, unfortunately.

Nick Liadis (23:14):

I think it depends on, I’m not sure if that that call can be made yet, Jon, because Like, there are a number of ways of thinking about how to make a building bird safe. It really has to do with the, the budget of the building and how much the architects are pushed to think creatively about what a bird safe intervention is. It could be really expensive, but it also could be very economical if it’s done in, in the right way, if it’s done at the onset of the building design where it’s incorporated into other aspects of, of how the building is conceived and, and, and thought of. So I think there is opportunity to do it with minimal impact on the budget.

Jon Rice (23:56):

And I feel like that rolls nicely into work that you’ve done contracted by American Bird Conservancy to help educate architects to think about their design and, and reshape how we think about designing the built space to have these sorts of things in mind to, to utilize creatively, you know, facades and interventions and things so that they’re naturally bird safe without coming at it from this. Like, okay, here’s the building now let’s make it, you know, bird safe, you know, and kind of forcing that in, but making it or organic as part of the process.

Nick Liadis (24:32):

Yep, exactly. So that it’s, it’s part of the design language. The architects have control of it as a design element on the building. They can control the visual language of that intervention so that it, you don’t look at the building and say, oh my gosh, that building is clearly trying to protect, protect birds. And it’s kind of seamless in its presence across, across the building, just like any other building element.

Jon Rice (24:57):

Yeah, I, I can picture a handful of buildings that are, are like that, that have been designed that way that I can think of. Could you name a couple just for listeners to kind of go and, and search on Google?

Nick Liadis (25:09):

One that I like to talk a lot about is the de Young, the de Young Museum in San Francisco is a building that appears in some of my lectures about bird safe design. This isn’t a building that was that was asked to be bird safe. It’s just that the way that the architects thought about the screens that wrap this building they’re over top of the glass. And it’s to sort of protect the artwork that’s on the inside of the building to shade it from intense solar heat and solar glare, which can degrade the artwork. It provides an interesting experience to the folks inside the museum that there are, there are vast areas of that building that are bird safe because that glass has this sort of perforated screen across it. And so I use that as a kind of precedent, as an example of what a bird safe building could be, so birds aren’t colliding with the glass where that that perforated screen is present on that building.

Nick Liadis (26:06):

And again, the architects weren’t probably thinking about the birds, but it just so happened to be a bird safe element because it’s protecting the glass. And of course, it’s part of the architectural language of the building. The architects wanted it to be there because it provides an interesting experience for users inside the building. It does interesting things with light. It probably shades the artwork from a lot of direct sunlight and is probably helping the building to maybe even thermoregulate. So yes, there are, are some buildings out there that are bird safe, but sort of like, sort of by accident they’re bird safe. They are definitely part of the conversation about what a bird safe building can be. We can learn from those and really push the boundaries about what a bird safe intervention is on a building.

Josh Raulerson (26:50):

I, I have to think there would be some companies, people that were about to build a building for whom it would actually kind of burnish their brand. They, they might actually want to look like a bird safe building, right? Is that a selling point?

Jon Rice (27:04):

I think of the Frick Environmental Center here in Pittsburgh that is a LEED-certified sustainable building. Or it’s a living building, excuse me. It’s a, it’s living building. So it has all of these specific functions that it has that make it a living building. Bird safety was not exactly incorporated in the, in the process of the design, but the, the staff of the Frick Environmental Center have worked for years to incorporate bird safe interventions here and there to make it part of the regular lived experience of the educators, of the school groups and students that they have children and adult students that come through and use the space. And it’s, it’s become part of their identity in some ways that, that they have these differing interventions that that, that have changed the facade in some ways that they’ve certainly bought into that make it bird safe in, in specific areas where they were noting window collisions for sure.

Jon Rice (28:05):

So yeah, I think that some people would, would hold that as sort of a, a torch that it’s a bird safe building. For sure. I know that our new banding lab out at, out at Powdermill is, it’s LEED certified to a, to a lower, a lower level, but one of the portions that it has is, is bird safe glass, which makes sense. But yeah, that’s something certainly that, that we would talk about. And the Natural History Museum has worked, and, and Carnegie Art Museum has worked together to address issues of window collisions on our own building to, to make sure that we are practicing what we preach. And yeah, there’s e even if it’s not at the outset, I definitely think that buildings can sort of address an issue that they’re most of the time unaware of. And, and especially in conversations I’ve had with folks downtown, they’re so incredibly shocked by what they hear that they want to hear how they can change it, how they can make it different. And, you know, that doesn’t end with a LEED certification of some kind, but I think most people don’t want their building to be associated with, with death <laugh> for sure <laugh>.

Nick Liadis (29:16):

Well, and, and like, I, I really love the idea that like, you know, the, like building elements can communicate why, why they’re there. That that is a, like an interesting architectural idea. I think that like not enough people know about bird safe design, right? That’s something that we have to keep working on. I mean, part of, like, my job in Jon’s job is to make sure that as, as many people that we can reach as many people as we can in terms of education and, and awareness. And so I’m not sure the average person, if you show them a window that has like a pattern of dots, I’m not sure that they, they’d even recognize why those dots are, are even there. They might say, oh, maybe it’s for shading, or if it’s, it might be to like if it’s on a glass door, maybe to prevent people from walking into the glass door or something.

Nick Liadis (30:04):

And so very often when you see buildings that have bird safe interventions on them, a lot of times, not always, but they might have some signage that kind of educates people about why that intervention is there. So I think definitely as more people become aware of the collision problem being a big problem, then you know, more people might begin to recognize when a building is bird safe. But I don’t think we’re there yet for it to be a kind of instantaneous, like, ah, like I recognize that window’s bird safe, sort of what of my long-term goals is to keep, keep, you know, educating people on, on that. It’s interesting that a lot of folks like have experienced a collision. Most people that I talk to have experienced a bird flying into a window or at least aware of the problem. And so, but nobody understands that the, the magnitude of it, right, or that everyone else out there practically everyone else out there has also experienced this.

Nick Liadis (31:01):

So it, it does amount to a lot of birds. And so when I tell people that, you know upwards of a billion with a bee, birds collide with windows fatally in, in the United States and Canada, it’s, it’s, you know, always a kind of big surprise. I have to underscore the, the B because yeah, people can’t quite wrap their head. I mean, I can barely wrap my head around a billion birds. That’s a huge percentage of the birds that are out there. So it is a ubiquitous problem, and it’s not even associated with any particular region or city. It’s sort of, yes, some cities and some regions might be might have more of a collision problem because they’re on a, a migratory flyaway or a pathway. But generally the collision problem is ubiquitous. Wherever there’s a building and some vegetation, or maybe even in the case of house sparrows and starlings, if there’s a window on a building, a collision can, can occur.

Jon Rice (32:02):

Yeah, only about 2% of window collisions happen at, at high rise buildings in downtown cities. The other 98% are happening at low rise buildings just across the landscape because there’s so much sprawl now that, that, you know, it’s happening as birds are moving through people’s backyards as they’re moving through, you know, our parks and industrial parks, and we focus on these downtown areas so much because of the light. And it’s sort of like we can do a, a lot in this one area of focus. And, and likewise with the, if we focus one area that might cause change to happen elsewhere, the whole domino effect idea, you know, being able to impact regions outside of cities from within. But yeah, that upwards of a billion birds, that’s only 2% are colliding with, with high, like high rise skyscrapers that, that a lot of those birds are impacted by light pollution.

Jon Rice (32:57):

But the majority are happening on individual, you know, low-rise buildings. And, and it’s hard for people to understand a billion just as a number. It’s very hard for the human brain to compute the, the, the number 1 billion. Like, the difference between a million and a billion is the scale that most people can’t really comprehend. So it’s hard to get people to understand why two or three birds on their individual home across an entire year is impactful for them to put up window film of some kind or, or some kind of intervention. You know, they just don’t see how that scales up. But if we talk about all glass across the landscape, changing through these small individual interactions, that that’s how change is made over time. But that’s education and outreach as Nick said. That’s, that’s that’s step one. And we’re, we’re still in that.

Josh Raulerson (33:50):

Nick Liadis, Jon Rice, thank you so much for being on Pennsylvania Legacies, and thanks for all the work you’re doing out there for birds.

Jon Rice (33:56):

Thank you for having us.

Josh Raulerson (34:03):

You can learn more about preventing bird collisions at home and find a list of window products approved by the American Bird Conservancy by clicking the link in the show notes to this episode on the Peck website. If you’re interested in tracking bird migration in your area, we’ll also link you to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, which maintains a real-time migration tracker. And we’ll point you toward the first half of the interview you just heard from earlier this year on the campaign to limit light pollution that often causes window strikes to kill birds. That’s all on the PEC website: pecpa.org, pecpa.org, where all of our past podcast episodes can be found. You can listen right there in your web browser or subscribe using your mobile app choice. And that’s all for this week. Thanks for listening to Pennsylvania Legacies. Hope you’ll be here for the next one coming out in a couple of weeks. Until then, for the Pennsylvania Environmental Council, I’m Josh Raulerson, and thanks for listening.