Birds' Eye View

My windows reflects the sky and trees like a mirror so for years I heard ‘whump’ as birds flew into a glassy paradise. Week after week, sparrows, robins, thrushes, jays, and once, a big fat chucker that didn’t belong in suburbia to anyway, dropped in mid-flight to the ground to be carried away by cats or raccoons.
Then when Ryanne was a toddler I let her put window clings of hearts and bunnies on the living room window. For the next year we changed them with the seasons and holidays until finally I noticed that birds weren’t hitting the window anymore. After that, every window in the house got the holiday treatment. Bats in October, elves in December, bunnies in the spring. No more dead birds in the bushes.
Ryanne isn’t interested in helping anymore, and I have gotten a little tired of cartoon characters, so I’ve switched to paper flowers that I make late at night when I can’t sleep. I read in an Audubon magazine that window stickers don’t work, but let me tell you- Audubon Magazine is wrong. Sure, those sophisticated silhouettes of birds in flight don’t work. They just blend in with the shadow reflections like camouflage. Birds need a warning sign, something that tells them they are at the border of a strange, unnatural world where death waits.
So if you want to keep birds from smacking into your windows you need neon yellow, bright pink, vivid red. Don’t do anything that looks subtle. Birds don’t get it. Symmetric, unnatural shapes as well as pictures with faces work well. Right now my window has florescent pink and yellow spirals. They are so bright that they light up the whole neighborhood.
As an added bonus, hummingbirds fly right up to them, hoping for a sip of exotic nectar. I think they come from miles around because I’ve seen half a dozen at one time. They probably can see my window from space.
Nancy Sherer