Creating bird-friendly buildings — on campus and beyond

More than 1 billion birds are killed each year as a result of window collisions in North America alone, making buildings the leading human-caused driver of wild bird mortality.

To help reduce these collisions, the Yale Bird-Friendly Building Initiative aims to accelerate the adoption of bird-friendly design on Yale’s campus and beyond.

In a new video, members of the Yale community describe the scale of this crisis and how a series of efforts by the Yale Bird-Friendly Building Initiative — with support from Yale Planetary Solutions (YPS) — is tracking and reducing bird mortality on the Yale campus, and promoting bird-friendly solutions for other communities and organizations. And they describe why it’s important to protect the world’s birds from this human-caused threat.

Yale Planetary Solutions is a university-wide initiative aimed at developing practical responses that will have an impact on Earth’s global crises such as climate, biodiversity, and the disruption of biogeochemical cycles.

The YPS seed grant program is supported by the Three Cairns Climate Impact Innovation Fund; the Science Catalyst Fund for Planetary Solutions; Gordon Data and Environmental Research Grants; and the Provost’s Resource Fund for Planetary Solutions.

The Yale Bird-Friendly Building Initiative is a collaboration between Law, Ethics & Animals at Yale Law School, the Yale Peabody Museum, the Yale Office of Sustainability, and the nonprofit American Bird Conservancy.