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[–] 320 points 4 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (102 children)

FYI, not all bird glass has visible fritting. They also come with UV reflective coatings that are almost transparent to the human eye (unless you're really close to the glass), e.g.,

Some UV treatments are stripes, others similar to an elongated version of the fritting from OP, and then there's the camo-stick-like version above. Stripes are the most noticeable to humans.

ETA: From personal experience, the glass is completely transparent from ~2+ meters away, and you have to be very close or staring directly at glare from the sun to see it when <2m away.

ETA2: Someone else shared the Wikipedia article on bird collisions below, but I wanted to take a second to highlight this graph from the article:

If you think bird safe glass is cool, spaying/neutering your cats and keeping them inside or on a leash is waaay cooler.

(This graph doesn't include indirect causes of death like climate change, deforestation, and pesticide use, but that doesn't make responsible pet ownership any less cool)

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  • [–] 23 points 3 days ago (2 children)

    Also note how low wind turbines actually are on that list. The oil industry lives to harp on the number of birds killed by wind turbines, but you never hear them about the much larger number of birds killed by vehicles.

    Still worth reducing every number on that list of course, but keep some perspective.

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  • [–] 49 points 4 days ago* (19 children)

    That's blowing my mind that birds, masters of the sky - a realm to which they can easily escape to where few can follow, are such a frequent snack for cats, who under usual circumstances don't often fly. Cats are like ninjas.

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  • [–] 10 points 3 days ago (10 children)

    I had an indoor/outdoor cat that would catch birds at night, bring them home dead , and play with them.

    What a mess.

    Next cat would only go out during the day and lay around. He did manage to catch two rats

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  • [–] 7 points 3 days ago (1 child)

    My cat ran a mouse up my curtain yestetday. Came to bed, there’s a cat just staring up at the wall over my bed.. I figured it was greebles, but then the mouse poked it’s head out of the grommets..

    Needless to say I managed to scare it off the curtain and we teamed up to get it out of the house.

    My cats don’t get to go outside. I used to have a free-access catio, but a former cat would bring chipmunks inside and let them go, and once kept a dead squirrel in a box in an unused closet for three days while he ate it (i didn’t actually think to look in the closet he kept going into, cats are weird and do weird things..), so…. That’s not allowed anymore.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 days ago

    There's that time of the year when birds land, make nests, lay eggs and have to hang around to feed their young. That's a very vulnerable time for them. Make sure your bird house and bird feeder are cat proof.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 days ago (4 children)

    Someone should figure out how to paint cats so that birds can avoid them.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 days ago (3 children)
  • [–] 4 points 2 days ago* (3 children)

    Is the cat issue specific to the Americas or something? Because here in Europe we've had cats for thousands of years and in Africa they existed long before that even, so I don't see how some pets getting out sometimes is any worse than the feral cats that existed long ago

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  • [–] 2 points 2 days ago

    Birds that get eaten tend to have high reproductive rates, and if predator levels drop their population gets so high they start to die from hunger or disease (which spreads faster in crowded conditions). Many predators eat an incredible number of animals - a large owl may eat several small birds every day for itself, and a multiple of that if feeding nestlings. Cats aren't unique here.

    Domestic cats can be a threat to specific populations already endangered by other factors, but usually those are ground animals. Cats being a threat to population levels of birds in most of the world just isn't believable to me.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 days ago

    Domestic cats that go out to hunt aren't controlled by natural causes, like food availability for example. But they go out at night to hunt nonetheless, and they're usually in their peak conditions because they don't have to go hungry for long periods of time.

    As numbers that I am aware of,

    Cats kill an estimated 50-200 million birds annually in Germany, according to NABU and Max Planck Institute estimates

    With a cat population of Germany approximately 15 million, most of which are permanently indoor, the rest are keeping themselves very busy for no reason

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  • [–] 1 point 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

    I have always suspected it's a minor bit of public misdirection to keep the stray cat population down in North America. Other parts of the world have much larger numbers of outdoor cats and their bird populations are no worse off.

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  • [–] 11 points 3 days ago (16 children)

    They're starting to crack down on cats in my area. They have a curfew. In some districts, they are not allowed outside. There are areas near me where cats are outright banned.

    The birds that die near me tend to hit the glass then fall into my dog's mouth. The cleaner the glass, the more it happens.

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  • [–] 16 points 3 days ago (15 children)

    The cats have a curfew? Have you met cats?

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  • [–] 17 points 4 days ago (3 children)

    Ah that explains it. But why would they bother with the dots? Perhaps to make it clear to others that the window is compliant? All the information I can find online seems to suggest that it's the dots that makes the window visible to the birds.

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  • [–] 43 points 4 days ago*

    From the wiki for bird-window collisions:

    There are several methods of preventing bird-window strikes. The use of ultraviolet (UV) signals to make windows appear visible to birds, while once one of the most common means of combatting this issue, is no longer recommended by experts. This is because while some birds can see UV light, not all can. Other solutions include window film (as long as it is placed on the exterior of the glass) and ceramic frit glass (glass with fritdots).[30] Windows can also be covered with decals spaced no more than 5 cm horizontally or 10 cm vertically to prevent collisions.[31]

    I had assumed it was cheaper to do dots, but it’s actually just more broadly effective. That’s a better reason :)

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  • [–] 1 point 2 days ago

    Cats get the most common types of birds, though, while windows can get entire flocks of less common birds during migration. For susceptible migratory birds, windows are a much higher population level threat.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 days ago

    I think I read something like 90% of the cat killings come from non-pet cats, and there's maybe three pets for every four to five strays. Obviously, spay/neuter is the best defense, and on top of that maybe going a step further and trapping your local strays. And unless we start treating stray cats like pests, I'm not sure how doable it is to try to call the population via spay neuter.

    And I'll be honest, I'm less concerned about the mammals deaths, because I'd never be mad at my car for catching mice. Catch mice all day dude.

    And if I'm being really honest, I think some birds are real assholes, but maybe that's a discussion for another day.

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