Bird Safe Building Design Guidelines
NYC Audbon Society’s guidelines to bird-safe building design.
The Guidelines promote measures to protect birdlife in the planning, design, and operation stages of all types of buildings, in all settings. They also complement and inform today’s green building initiatives, especially the widely utilized LEED.
Gleaming by day and glittering at night, glazed buildings that make up modern city skylines and suburban settings present serious hazards for birds. Bird populations, already in decline from loss of habitat, are seriously threatened by the relatively recent incursion of man-made structures into avian air space. In the United States, an estimated ioo million to one billion birds perish each year from encounters with buildings.
Bird injury or death is largely attributable to two factors: birds, it would appear, are unable to detect and avoid glass, either during the daytime or night. Moreover, buildings’ artihcial night lighting confounds night-migrating species. Today, preventative actions mindful of these hazards are emerging in building practice. With bird-safe measures at hand, we can avoid the adverse consequences that until recently seemed inevitable though unintended…
Click here to download the Guidelines