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this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2026
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Today I Learned
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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)
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.
Many of these graphs were made to show that windmills do not really contribute to bird death.
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.
Cats are expert hunters
Gotta land sometime, bitch 🐈⬛
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
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.
My parents at would do the same with chipmunks.
That cat would also growl at kids waking home from school while sitting inside near the window.
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.
The graph's message is clear: immediately dismantle all wind turbines and ramp up clean coal!
/s
"Beautiful, clean coal."
Someone should figure out how to paint cats so that birds can avoid them.
They have.
Birdsafe collars reduce bird catches by 87%. (A bell will reduce bird catches by 41%).
https://www.usgs.gov/publications/how-effective-birdsbesafer-cat-collar-reducing-bird-mortality-domestic-cats
"Domestic cats kill an estimated 2.4 billion birds each year in the United States.."
I would not have guessed such an incredibly high number. 😳
Ha! That's really cool!
Right!? I wish more people knew about them. I'm not advocating for outdoor pets but if owners are going to insist they should at least make efforts to reduce the cat's hunting efficiency.
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
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.
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,
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
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.
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.
The cats have a curfew? Have you met cats?
If they break curfew, they are captured and kept in cages. They might be forcefully sterilized or even killed via lethal injection.
that's horrible, what the hell area do you live in?
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.
From the wiki for bird-window collisions:
I had assumed it was cheaper to do dots, but it’s actually just more broadly effective. That’s a better reason :)
Dots are cheaper than UV filters and easier to apply retroactively. Both have the same effect of creating a visible obstruction for birds to discourage strikes.
If you have a problem with feral cats in an area, find a secluded spot nearby and plant catnip.
You will now have feral cats that are high AF & not killing shit.
Wait until you figure out how many birds humans kill.
So all of the windows in NYC look like Eddie Van Halen's guitar to birds?
Neat.
birds have a 4th color cone receptor. so thier eye sight is more advanced than ours.
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.
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.