That should be 1,000,000,000/year.

The bird window death numbers don't compute. It would come to about 3 a year per person in the U.S. alone! I am 50 and only recall witnessing a couple of these in half a century, and the same can be said for my relatives. I would have noticed if that many bird corpses were lying about. Also, I read the article that was claimed as the source of the numbers. No where in that article did it provide any scientific, research based information to back up those numbers. All it kept doing was using.... More

I'm reading the standard American response in a lot of comments: "I've never heard of this or I don't understand it, so it can't be true."

The numbers are not inflated. There are chrome and glass buildings all over America and they are a graveyard for birds, since they so perfectly reflect the sky. This is why a lot of new buildings have special glass that reflects a bright mesh pattern that is highly visible to birds.

In 1973, I was a college student in the Boston area. I was walking around early in the morning, and came to the Prudential building. It had shops on the ground level (outside) with glass walls all around as windbreaks. There was an old man with a broom, sweeping up piles of dead and dying birds. He told me that it happened every night during migration season.

It happens.

Collisions with glass comprise the second biggest man-made threat to birds in the U.S. after habitat loss. Just because you don't see dead bird by your windows doesn't mean your pane isn't causing premature avian death. Birds that have run into windows are often eaten by scavengers or, if the collision occurs in a city, they're swept out of the way by street cleaning crews. Here's some more reading on the subject; do note that it's from a bit over a year ago: .... More

All this time I thought it was the wind turbines generating electricity that were killing the birds. Sounds like another environmentalist wacko who won't be happy until we are all living like it's 1800. If a bird is too stupid to avoid a window, then Darwin was right...

I love the line "I see no immediate reason why these figures would be erroneous."

To say that windows are possibly killing more birds than both hunters and cats is just wanton misinformation. Sure there's a source linked, but his numbers are just estimates. What are they based on? Oh yeah, other estimates... and his own personal vendetta against windows. This is just another example of American fear-mongering and blatant stupidity. "I see no immediate reason why these figures would be.... More

It seems like the majority of commenters didn't feel it necessary to follow up on the source given:

http://aco.muhlenberg.edu/Bird-Glass-Overview-D-Klem-Jr-2008.pdf

This guy obviously learned math at the school of Numbers I Just Pulled Out Of My A**. This might be believable if there were dump trucks of dead birds being piled up with nowhere to put them. I thought science was supposed to be objective.

I'm not ankle deep in dead birds here in a major city. OK so there are some birds that fly into glass. Boo hoo. Who counted all these dead birds? And how many of the dead birds are simply pigeons that had been poisoned? I walk down city streets among tall buildings and I don't see a bird on the sidewalk or street. WTF kind of idiot writes this stuff? And WHO TF is the idiot that gives this any publicity at all, even on the internet? How about I write an article about Martians.... More

THERE ARE DEAD BIRDS EVERYWHERE JUST MASSIVE PILES OH MY GOD THE HORROR THERE IS BIRD BLOOD RUNNING IN THE GUTTERS THE PESTILENCE BROUGHT ON BY THESE BILLIONS OF DYING BIRDS IS SURE TO INFECT US ALL THIS IS THE NEW BLACK DEATH.

I had no clue that a computer operating system could be so destructive.

I blame Bill Gates.

It has been my observation most of the birds that hit my picture window do so around the time of the vernal or autumnal equinox. Maybe it has something to do with the angle of the sun at this of the year. My picture window faces the north and doesn't usually have shades down the way that the other windows do.

Sounds like an open and shut case to me.

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All the more reason to reduce chemical exposure and just not bother cleaning the windows, if you ask me ;) Windex is the enemy here, methinks.