A bird hit the big window again, and this one didn't get up

The hawk sticker has been up since spring. The robins don't mind it. — Homeowner with a glass back wall, 2019

The hawk sticker everybody puts on the glass doesn't work. A bird isn't afraid of one sticker in the middle of a window. It never saw the window. It saw the trees and sky in it, and flew at them. The Fish and Wildlife Service says nearly a billion birds a year hit glass in this country. What helps is marking the outside of the glass with stripes or dots about two inches apart, so there's no gap a bird will try. Paint does it. It stops most strikes, not all. The sticker was a nice thought.

For now: put paint or tape marks on the outside of the glass, no more than two inches apart.

The full file

Birds have been hitting windows since there were windows. Audubon says people were noticing it in the 1800s. And skyscrapers aren't doing most of the damage. In research Cornell's bird lab cites, 44% of deadly strikes were at houses one to three stories tall, and less than 1% at buildings of 12 stories or more. The American Bird Conservancy figures a house kills about two birds a year. That doesn't sound like much until you count the houses.

Chicago ran the big test. On one night in October 2023, nearly 1,000 migrating birds died against the glass at McCormick Place, the convention center. The owners covered the outside of the glass in white dots, two inches apart. Cornell reports that dead-bird recoveries fell by more than 95%. A bird monitor there still found 48 that fall. Not zero.

If dots sound like work, hang cord. Cornell and the New York bird group both say parachute cord on the outside of the glass, about four inches apart. Lines that run up and down can sit four inches apart. Lines that run sideways need two. It isn't pretty. It works better than the hawk.