There’s a lot we still don’t understand about urban bird threats, nationally and at the smaller scale of our capital city, but there are some awesome birdy people out there doing important work to fix that. Staff and volunteers at Birds Canada have coordinated shorebird monitoring on our near-urban beaches for many years now, while educating the public on good beach practices through signage and other outreach activities. Researchers at Dalhousie University recently partnered with Hope for Wildlife to analyze trends in their rehabilitation database, exploring possible connections between bird injury/mortality, the nature of the incident that brought the bird to the rescue, and where in the city they came from. Volunteers at the Nova Scotia Bird Society are looking at the possibility of organizing citizen science walks that would target window-strikes, identifying possible strike hotspots around the city. And we at Nature Nova Scotia are mobilizing citizens to take on stewardship actions that benefit the birds near them.

We piloted Operation Window Strike in the Spring of 2022, engaging Haligonians in bird stewardship right at home. Thirty residents of our biggest city took on the threat of window-strikes by implementing one or more bird-friendly window solutions, which we delivered right to their door. And they’ve done awesome stuff with them! Here’s an example from a participant who got creative with their paint pens and another from participants who opted for the grid-like pattern created with Feather Friendly tape on their deck railing.