Where might an adult male have been?
Answering this question may take 10 years of observation. Using the long-term monitoring group based on personality markings established in Dongzhai, Xinyang, Henan Province, in 2008, professors from Sun Yat-sen University, Beijing Normal University, Australian National University and the University of Groningen in the Netherlands have tried to track the migration of hair crowns and capuchins with various trackers.
In the spring of 2021, the high-precision GPS tracker finally successfully recorded the northward migration of a hair-crowned captail from the wintering ground to the breeding ground after experiencing the problem of insufficient solar energy charging in the early stage.
The bird, which migrates only at night, left its wintering grounds in northern Thailand in April 2021 and flew over 2,090 kilometers in 19 days, arriving at Dongzhai, the previous year's breeding ground, on May 2. The scientists found that it had only 7 days to move, and the rest of the time it was "precisely clocked in" intermittently, including 6 stops in Laos, Vietnam and China, all very close to the national border or The border of China's provinces.
Scientists believe that this "precision" may be because these stops are mostly inaccessible and complex mountains, the forest ecological environment is better, the insects are more diverse, and the capuchin can quickly replenish the energy consumed by migration during the day.
While scientists cheered on the success of the first tracking in 10 years, the warnings followed: The migration was likely to come to an abrupt halt due to a bird-hit building.
In September 2021, volunteers from the New York City Bird watching association took to Twitter to display the carcasses of birds they had picked up that day that had died as a result of the impact
Bird collision with buildings refers to birds can not recognize the existence of glass due to the transparent and reflective characteristics of glass, thus colliding with buildings, especially glass windows, resulting in injury or death. Related studies in North America have shown that bird strikes are considered to be the second largest cause of bird death caused by humans after domestic cat predation. In Canada, about 25 million individual birds die each year due to bird strikes, while in the United States, the number is staggering 365 million to 1 billion.
Three of the world's eight important migratory bird migration zones – West Asia–East Africa, Central Asia, and East Asia–Australasia –pass through China and cover almost the entire territory of China. This means that a large number of birds fly over Chinese cities or villages every year, and the risk of them colliding with buildings is not small. However, compared to decades of research in North America, most people in China may not even be aware of the problem of birds hitting buildings.
In September 2021, Duke Kunshan University, together with the Youth Action Network and the Chengdu Bird Watching Association, released its first China-wide bird collision survey report. Li Binbin, the initiator of the survey and an assistant professor at the Environmental Research Center of Duke Kunshan University, told Global magazine that in the spring of 2022, a new round of observations in many areas has begun, and the WeChat public account of this survey project, "Bird Collision Action Network", has also been officially launched. She hopes that through citizen science, the public will not only be made aware that bird collisions are a real problem, but also that the whole society can think more about how to achieve harmony between people and wildlife in cities.
Text | Le Yan Na
This article is reproduced from the WeChat public account "Globe Magazine Agency" (ID: GlobeMagazine), the original article was first published on May 10, 2022, the original title is "These birds that died because of glass, need attention!" 》。
1 Bird collision incident around
For birds during the migratory season, New York is probably the most dangerous city in the world. In September 2021, a new York City Bird Watching Association volunteer tweeted showing off the results of the morning's monitoring: "I picked up 226 birds that died from hitting the glass, and here are some of them. There are 205 of them under two buildings at the World Trade Center in New York alone. More have been swept away, or the flesh and blood are too blurry to pick up. Of the 30 injured, the Wild Birds Foundation has been contacted. If you're in New York today, be careful when walking. ”
The Circa Central Park high-end condominium, located on the northwest diagonal of New York's Central Park, is also known as the "death trap" for migratory birds because of its curved façade shape and glass curtain wall.
In March 2021, a bird flew over the Hong Kong Trade Centre
Li Binbin told the "Global" magazine reporter that the cause of the bird collision has a greater connection with the glass on the building and the night lights. During the day, birds see reflective glass reflecting vegetation, sky, etc., thinking that the place on the glass can be reached, so they collide with the glass; or birds see the plant or space on the other side through the transparent glass, thinking that they can fly to the opposite side of the environment. At night, artificial light can cause birds to lose their sense of direction and attract birds. Most birds die directly after hitting a building, and even if they survive, they suffer injuries ranging from a ruptured beak to intracranial hemorrhage.
Since the 1980s and 1990s, scholars in North America have begun to pay attention to the topic of bird collision architecture, and the number of academic papers has grown rapidly in the past decade. For example, colleges and universities, including Duke University and Cleveland State University, conducted systematic bird collision surveys during the migration season and took anti-bird collision measures on campus with bird collision data as support; Chicago's McCormick Square Lakeside Center conducted a 43-year systematic survey, recording more than 40,000 bird collisions, revealing the law that nighttime lights will cause bird collisions to occur more frequently. The large-scale systematic survey, represented by the 2014 Migration Season's Trans-North American Bird Collision Survey, which included 40 North American and Mexican universities, covered 281 buildings, and revealed the relationship between urbanization and the frequency of bird collisions.
In addition to systematic research projects, there are numerous randomly reported bird collision projects in North America, including the 11-year-old Chicago Bird Collision Monitoring Project and the Bird-Friendly Building Project affiliated with canada's Deadly Light Alert Project.
In China, bird collision incidents have also been on the "hot search". For example, in April 2020, a glass curtain wall was installed in a house between two buildings in Changping, Beijing, and because the glass mirror reflected the sky, many migratory birds mistakenly thought that the curtain wall was the sky and were killed. Later, the relevant personnel covered the curtain wall with a tarpaulin and covered it up. Despite the concerns of many animal protection societies, systematic and scientific research projects have been absent.
In 2017, Li Binbin, who participated in the Duke University Bird Collision Project in the United States, also witnessed several bird collisions at Duke Kunshan University, and she began to change the concept that ecological protection is more in the wild, believing that cities are also important places for biodiversity and ecological protection. That year, she began to organize graduate students in environmental policy to investigate the phenomenon of bird collisions on campus, and formed the first report on bird collisions on campus. In the fall of 2019, under her guidance, the Duke Kunshan University Bird Collision Program team began a systematic survey of the twice-yearly migration season of bird collisions in the school. In September of the same year, Dr. Zhu Lei and others of the Chengdu Bird Watching Association created a national random report submission platform for bird collision events based on the WeChat Mini Program.
However, due to geographical limitations or random reporting, these two projects cannot fully reflect the real occurrence of bird collisions. In the spring of 2021, Duke Kunshan University's Bird Collision Program Team, youth action network on climate change, and chengdu bird watching clubs partnered to launch a nationwide systematic bird collision survey.
After registration and screening, 128 individual volunteers and 33 volunteer groups participated in the 77-day survey, covering all Chinese provinces, autonomous regions and cities except Tibet, Ningxia and Taiwan. A total of 12 provincial-level administrative regions recorded 39 bird collisions, and 42 random bird collision records were reported outside the survey during the same period.
2 Unexpected findings
The results of this survey are far from those in North America. In this regard, Li Binbin said that the published research report is only a single data accumulation, and the input calculation amount is far from the number of bird collision construction incidents in China that can be estimated. "Only through years of continuous citizen science surveys, covering areas with different degrees of urbanization, including multiple data on different floors and building glass areas, can it be possible to obtain a more accurate estimate."
Despite the limited data, the survey report reveals some questions worth pondering. For example, the report shows that 82.1% of bird collisions occur on buildings below 6 floors, even 9 times as often as high-rise buildings, and 74.4% occur on buildings surrounded by trees. Li Binbin said, "This is indeed a relatively unexpected result, and more investigations and data are needed to confirm it." Bird collisions are mainly related to whether there is more glass cover on the surface of the building, whether there is vegetation around the building, and whether vegetation can be reflected. Bird strikes don't just happen in skyscrapers, and many factors have to be considered together. Therefore, for low-rise buildings, especially those with similar tree heights, we recommend reducing the use of glass or using special glass. ”
For example, the birds that have the most bird collisions are birds. Li Binbin explained that this is because many bird-shaped birds are forest-dwelling, often shuttled between leaves or between trees to form a "tunnel", more susceptible to the shape of the house, such as there is a gap between the two buildings, when the bird flies, subconsciously will fly forward along the corridor gap, at this time if there is suddenly an obstacle in front of the building, it is easy to crash. In addition, many finches do not fly in groups, the individual is small, and the flight speed is very fast, resulting in a large chance of bird collision and a high degree of injury. Other types of birds, such as some birds of prey or water birds, either fly at higher altitudes or move near the surface of the water, inhabiting relatively far from glass buildings, and the probability of bird collisions is relatively low.
"The bird collision survey is carried out in the hope that everyone can get to know these birds living in the city and understand the biodiversity in the city." Let everyone realize that due to the existence of some buildings, birds will face survival risks, and these risks can be avoided or reduced. For example, from an individual point of view, you can put some bird anti-collision stickers on the glass window, turn off unnecessary lights at night, close the curtains, and keep the houseplants away from the glass window. From the perspective of urban construction, urban planning practitioners, policymakers and architects can have a deeper understanding of the relationship between cities and biodiversity, and integrate biodiversity into the consideration of urban design. After all, humans are spending more and more time in cities, and how to make cities good habitats for people and wildlife will now contribute its important value. Li Binbin said.
3 The beginning of citizen science
In the spring of 2022, volunteers from the three regions of southern, eastern China and northern China have all been in place, and they will conduct a 4-7 week regular survey of bird strike buildings for selected buildings from April 18 at the latest, recording and submitting data as required. Surveys can be conducted in the mornings for 5 consecutive days a week, and the length of time required varies depending on the outer perimeter of the selected survey building, and can be completed in about 20 minutes.
Compared with the past such projects, which are usually carried out by animal protection organizations, Li Binbin defines his ongoing project as a citizen science project, "This concept has been proposed in the West for a long time, but the important thing is not only to use the data collected by citizens to analyze, but to develop a scientific data collection process and set up corresponding scientific questions before the project is carried out, only in this way can the correct data be collected and the foundation of follow-up policy support be formed." At the same time, regular training and mentoring of participants is also required. ”
Domestically, projects such as waterfowl animal observations in Guangxi have also used citizen science methods, but the number of such projects is still small. "In the United States, many projects are led by associations, such as the Bird Collision Project, which is organized by many bird protection societies. The problem in China is that social organizations rarely hire scientists or professionals for full-time work, resulting in a shortage of professionals in similar associations who can design scientific projects, while scientific research institutions have little energy to initiate large-scale social surveys or collect decades of data to draw a conclusion due to their academic pressure. Therefore, the combination of the two may be a direction for conducting citizen science projects in the future. Li Binbin told the "Global" magazine reporter.
However, the Bird Collision Research Project gave Li Binbin full confidence in the prospects of citizen science projects. "In the past, when conducting field ecological protection research, it was required to stay in the wild for at least one or two months, which actually limited the participation of many people. But bird strikes happen in cities, and many people will find that it's actually very simple to want to participate, so the project can affect more people. For example, volunteers who participated last year will sign up this year, and they themselves will carry out simple renovations on some buildings where bird collisions have been found and see their results. This influence will lay a good social foundation for future urban planning and architectural construction. ”
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