 Okay, well, here we go. Hello everyone. Welcome to BirdSafe Main, BirdSafe Main's fall 2023 webinar. Is that what year it is? It's great to be with you as we finish out our third full year of surveying. We are really excited for the fall. The fall is really where a lot of the important data comes. We get a lot more birds in the fall than the spring. There's a lot of action on the street. It's an important time to be out there. And it's already happening. We are already getting lots of strikes in migration, as folks know is already underway. And so the time is now to continue the research into bird strikes. Let me introduce some of my colleagues here before we get going. To my left on the thing here is Dr. Chris Maher from the University of Southern Maine. Hey, Chris. Good morning. Oh, no, now it is actually officially afternoon. Hi everybody. Welcome back to the returners and welcome to the new people. And below me on the screen here is our delightful friend, Katie Netland. She is our AmeriCorps GP cog, which stands for Greater Portland Council Governments Fellow. We have had her with us for 11 months now. She came in for a year long term and she will be departing our official role here right in the middle of our fall survey at the end of September. But it's been great having her so far. And hey, Katie. Hey. I think you've seen the Bangor air may have seen around the news recently. I was on the news recently. Nick, I'm here but don't see anyone but you. That's right. So Jim. So in this webinar format, we're just keeping it to the three presenters today. I see Jim in the chat so it's just just the three cameras on but there's attendees listening at home. So for that's part of the sort of technical spiel I'll give for folks. If you want to ask questions. It's a small crew so not a big deal, but you can put them in the Q&A box down below. Those are seen just by the three panelists here, or you can put them in the in the chat where everyone is typing which can be seen by everybody. So that's just the format of the of the thing today. So let's get to business. I'm going to talk a little bit on intro of this issue and what we do who we are. I will turn it over to Chris then to talk a little bit about some of the data we've collected so far. And then we'll talk a little bit about what the volunteering in Portland is at that point if there are people who are who are not interested in doing the actual Portland route. You can drop off or continue if you want to but it'll become more specific information for folks who want to help out with our Portland route walking and Katie at that point will give you some info about how to take some good photos. So without further ado, let me go ahead and do that. Right now. And hopefully everybody can see that. All right, well, we are bird safe main. This is a collaborative project between my organization main Audubon PSA is the Portland Society for architecture, and I'm sure that's the outdated logo, and he will be disappointed. This is the University of Southern Maine and then avian haven though we'll go up there. We are for groups who have come together to organize bird safe main. And what we do is understand this, this is a bird that has collided with a glass window and is now dead on the sidewalk this is a. This was a scarlet tannager. The environmental community and architectural community is waking up to the understanding of just how big a problem this is birds colliding with glass windows. The numbers, if you look at them are fairly staggering. This is a slide from the US Fish and Wildlife Service which collects information from studies about human cause bird mortality. And there at the top that bird building glass collisions, building glass collisions are estimated to kill between 365 million and 988 million birds per year in the United States. So that is at its most conservative estimate a million birds per day dying in the United States after colliding with glass. I'll share that to some other causes of mortality down below, you know, a lot of people get concerned about wind turbines. 140,000 there so you know the number of birds that have died this morning from colliding with windows is greater than the entire year long number of wind turbines. There are only a few factors that may sort of outpace building glass cats being one of them. But you can see that building glass collisions is now being recognized as one of the leading causes of bird mortality in the entire country. This happens. Sort of the problem peaks when birds are on the move. The year long problem as many of us studying it know but it definitely peaks as birds are on the move mostly because they have more opportunities to encounter buildings and glass. We are on the cusp of fall migration fall migration is the biggest bird movement time of the year. In the spring about three and a half billion birds come up from parts south Mexico wintering areas in the Caribbean South America. They move through the country to about two and a half billion of them move through Maine or near Maine on their way north. They all come to have babies right so their populations grow in the summer. And then in the fall they all start heading south. And so right about now we there are billions of birds that are on the move. There are even more birds in the country that may be doing localized movements or seasonal movements. Latitudinal movements. Altitudinal movements. And so this four billion birds doesn't even take into account the full movement of birds. There's a lot of birds in the mood. And as they move they encounter things which they hadn't encountered before, you know before humans were around and built all the things we built glass is not something that birds are used to dealing with. But now it is a major sort of aspect of the landscape. This glass building here is something that is very confusing to a bird right. This is not a natural part of the landscape not naturally something to have to deal with, but it's very confusing glass plays a number of tricks on birds. One of the most common is that it's reflective right. So here's a big glass building to a bird used to flying through the sky this just looks like the sky right and so this. A bird will simply just be flying through the sky and could encounter a building like this, not having any way to prepare itself no way to understand what what this threat is, and, and collide. It also reflects the sky it also reflects habitat. The majority of bird strikes are actually lower to the ground and the first three levels of three floors of a building. Because typically what birds are doing is not flying high through the sky, but flying low from from the safety to safety of different vegetation, or looking for food. So where vegetation is reflected in a in glass that can become very dangerous for birds as they think they're moving to safety rather. So glass is reflective but it's also transparent glass can become invisible at certain times of the day. I was introduced to this work when I lived in Washington DC in the early 2010s. Did a similar program down there we walked a route through through DC looking for birds that had struck buildings during migration. This building one was one of our biggest culprits then this is the Thurgood Marshall judiciary building near Union Station. So this sort of two stone buildings connected by a big glass atrium, which during the day reflects the sky in the sunset, but at night is lit from within to highlight these big bamboo growths in the middle. The next year is just simply invisible you know when lit from within this this vegetation is sort of a beacon to birds migrating through and they would attempt to make it in and collide with the class. So building glass is just a trick that plays that it can be deadly to millions of birds a year. These birds are a factor as well. Lights can attract insects, which attract birds who want to feed on them. Lights can also sort of confuse birds as they're migrating and then they work to sort of to connect other migrants into them. This is the tribute in light. On September 11, the site of the Twin Towers where at that time every year they beam these very bright lights up into the sky. September 11 is right at the height of all migration, and you can see here reflected in these lights, a number of birds that have been attracted to the lights. There's some studies showing just how attractive they are where thousands of birds come into these lights when they are turned on on September 11. The role of lighting and glasses is fairly complicated. During our years of walking on this project and you know where the science is going. Glass itself, you know, certainly we want to work to reduce our light loss there are a number of benefits we gain from you know covering lights and not shooting them up into the sky. Glass is really the problem it's it's a it's a day and night problem potentially. And so glasses are major focus here. The good thing about this problem is that there are lots of solutions right there are lots of ways that we can work to make better buildings that are just as light and airy, but that don't have the reflective dangers of, you know, a big mirrored glass building. There's just a couple of sort of fancy examples of buildings in New York City that have different treatments on their glass. The building on the left there has a mixture of frosted and fritted glass, which, even though it's just a simple sort of all glass building, like you may see had uses a number of techniques to reduce its threat to birds. That last count I had heard from the New York City folks who monitor this building that they had never recorded a bird strike there. The building on the right is covered in sort of screen mesh. This is a really interesting technique where you can still get all the light and benefits from having all glass, but you also get a number of privacy benefits and number of heat loss benefits, and plus it just looks cool on this building. There are other techniques to this is the Javits Center in New York so this is the same building that I showed here. This building, a big convention center was for many years considered that the deadliest bird building to two birds in the country. The number of you know threats it's all glass. It has a high level of reflection has a high level of, you know, it's lit from within at night, it also has a number of pass through areas. So an area where you could where a bird can see, look through two windows basically look through this window look through the back window, and then see trees or places on the other side. It's dangerous because the bird can just think it can fly through the sides of this building was for many years, you know, considered the most dangerous to birds they went went through a major retrofit, where they installed these glass, you know, glass with these fritted dots on them. This fritted material doesn't look like much at all to a human eye so this picture on the right is looking out through the fritted glass and you can't see anything there. However, they are able to detect these and know that this is a solid object and not a glass window it also cuts the reflection. And so this building was able to reduce its danger by about 90% after this retrofit. The number of other products on the market and more and more every day including etched glass and other fritted glass. You know this traditionally is you know bird safety is is a new issue for architects and builders. This is something that is not really taught in architecture schools yet, but is something that we are working with lots of them on as we sort of understand the scope of this problem. We're very lucky to have our partners at PSA Portland site architecture who have connected us to lots and lots of architects and designers in Portland and around Maine. Many of them, you know what willing and and wanting to understand what the, you know what's going on here and what they can do about it. And a lot, I will say, of that interest in demand is driven by people like us, driven by clients who now understand that they don't want to see dead birds, you know, outside their windows by employees who don't want to work in a building where birds are flying into their windows all the time I'm trying to get stuff done in a growing understanding among the public in large part through the work, the education that that we've done about what causes collisions what is a dangerous building, and what's a non dangerous building. And so this is our third end of our third year official surveying. Unless I'm wrong, and this is the beginning of our fourth year right Chris. We start in the spring of the fall. We started in the fall so you have completed three of three full cycles. That's right so this is the start of our fourth cycle. Right. And we've been getting the word out. And so part of what this volunteering is done is doing part of what we're asking you to do is, you know, we're using this data to really expand our education about what the problem is and guess what it's really having an effect on building owners. Case in point is the new LB headquarters that's going up in Freeport. You know this was built at a time, or designed at a time when we, we were just getting started here at bird save main and didn't have our education in place like we do now. There's a lot of glass on the woods facing side of that building, and they started having strikes, you know people are moving into the building and employees are seeing strikes and so they came back to us and said, you know we want to do something about it. Because of our collaboration, LB installed what we believe is the largest retrofit in New England so the largest sort of treatment of glass in New England about 19,000 square feet to help reduce their their danger. That's great. We are making some other policy strides as well so we're really proud of a couple issues here one is this bill. As of this spring main is just one of four states that has taken statewide action on birds, the bird safe issue. We passed this bill LD 670 to was called an act to protect birds and wildlife and the construction and maintenance of public buildings. What we're going to be doing throughout this year and in the fall and for another year is to work to develop guidelines that can be used in in public buildings. One of the few states that has anything like that. And we're really proud to have, you know, taken this step to continue the education of, you know builders and architects around the state. And we are also on the cusp of passing this, which is a ordinance in the state of Portland. The policy responses to this issue are going now our municipal ordinances, which require new buildings to be built with a certain bird safe standard. This is unlike the the statewide bill we passed these are not sort of voluntary guidelines this would be required as part of getting a building approved. We are, you know, we have really high hopes for, for getting this through the council this fall. And as you know, in order to do that we need the continued support of the volunteers to remind people that this is a problem in Portland this is happening. And so we have some a city council meeting coming up on September 13, where hopefully we'll get some subcommittee approval and move on from there. You know, we have policy. We've started for three years, you know, developing the data, pulling that data together. And we are using it to achieve policy ends that we're very excited about. Before I turn it over to Chris I'll just talk a little about you know what this is we do this first of all this is for statewide folks. So there's two basically parts of our monitoring one is a route that we have volunteers walk every morning in Portland to find birds on the street. The other is just folks living anywhere in Maine if you find a bird anywhere in your back porch at you know downtown somewhere. Let us know. So if you are one of those folks who doesn't live in Portland or is not interested in the the actual route walking volunteering. The next slide is for you. If you find a dead bird anywhere. It doesn't need to be in the fall. It can be anywhere anytime. Take a picture of it please and send it to us. If you send it to that bird strike at made on a bond or email address we will identify the bird and we will we will file it away in our system to to help with our advocacy. If you find an injured bird we partner with avian haven there's a number there that you can call if you'd like to get get assistance. And that's what we asked you to do simple as that just take a picture of the bird, take an evocative one if you can and Katie will tell you in a few minutes and some information about taking evocative pictures and and let us know. The other part is this a lot of these pictures were taken during the pandemic. I don't have a lot of mass on all the time, but is walking the streets of Portland. This is me crouching by a, a common yellow throat that had struck the wax building of commercial street down there. This is what this is what we do. We, we walk around the streets. We walk this the same route every day to try to figure out which buildings birds are striking against what species, what numbers, anything we can about about the problem in Portland. And guess what we find a lot. Here are the two Colin Burke girls famous volunteers of ours with some of the birds they found one fall that appears to be a white thirtied sparrow in a northern parallel there. And all kinds of birds we found hundreds and hundreds over our time. Some are dead, like this white thirtied sparrow and the swan's thrush and the Savannah sparrow. Some are alive and stunned like the common yellow throat in the hand there. We take photos and take recordings of each and everyone. I'll talk a little bit more in detail in a minute. Just quickly. Well, maybe I'll turn it over to Chris now and we'll get to the get to the rest of it in a minute. Okay. And actually let me just pause and ask this question really quickly. Is there material on the subject that can be provided for people refurbishing buildings. Yes. It's difficult. We have had success and retrofits the difficulty with retrofitting building especially in Portland is it's very expensive to do. And so, not every building can immediately sort of jump in retrofit but I think Katie has some exciting news coming up a little bit later, I'll let you just talk about that you want to about an exciting retrofit we're working on in Portland that we're excited to see this fall. Let's turn it over to Chris to this building has FEMA interesting let's talk later. Let's turn it over to Chris to talk to you about what we've learned so far in the couple of seasons we've been doing this. Okay, thanks. You have the ability to share Chris. It looks like it yes. Okay, here we go. All right, and let me just open. Okay. I'm just going to some of you, especially for some of the returning group here, you might just be interested to kind of see what your data, where your data have been going and how it's helping us figure affect some of those policy changes. So this is just for now this is just showing you the fall data since we're going into fall spring data look a little different but really, like Nick said falls our big time and you can see that, you know, even right from the get go we start finding birds in early September but the real peak comes in late September, early October which is about when the big pulse of migrants comes through the area and you see that it's fairly consistent has been fairly consistent for the last two years as to when we find birds. And when we find birds as oops, let's see here, come on. All right, there we go. They, we have these three different categories like Nick mentioned so some of the birds are dead some are stunned and some of them hit the buildings, and then just bounce off the many of them just kind of fly away and so those we designate and this is showing the different, the six different seasons that we have now. And one of the trends that you'll see. Well, first of all, I guess is that most of the birds we find are dead out of all the birds we see about 64% of all the birds we find are dead, but we do find about 40% of the birds that are just stunned and we'll talk more about what to do what we do with those birds, a little bit later, and then about 10% of the birds are just strikes and then they fly off. But, but the other thing that you might notice on this graph. And one of the reasons why we keep doing this every year is that the data the bars are trending upward. You see that every year, especially in the fall our numbers have gone way up and that's not strictly due to the fact that we have more people right on the streets because particularly in 21 and 22 we had the same number of groups walking the route, basically two pairs walking in opposite directions. But the reason we think is probably more that we have new buildings coming online that are posing a threat to birds. You see that that trend is also gone up somewhat in spring. And one of the reasons is that there's a lot fewer birds that hit in the spring compared to the fall which just goes back to the fact that there are just more birds moving in the fall and so we're going to see more birds striking. So what's going to be interesting this year is a to see if, if this trend continues, but especially because as Nick alluded to we have some kind of exciting retrofit news that could be important for will will be important for us to monitor this year and see how it's going to affect our data going forward. All right, so that in mind. All right, so who hits which birds hit. And so in this graph you can see that there's a lot of different families of birds that hit we find big birds even gulls and doves and pigeons and woodpeckers striking windows, but the vast majority of the birds are serene or songbirds and of those the vast vast majority are sparrows and warblers. So collectively about two thirds of all the birds that strike are in those two families. And if we drill down a little bit more and just look at the warblers. It's those common yellow throats which you've already seen a couple pictures of this picture that I put in here actually had two birds that were probably migrating together and collided pretty much the same time but and you see that again most of the birds that we find out the warblers are dead but there are some that just gets done but common yellow throats make up about 41% of all the warblers that we find and that's partly because of where yellow throats like to hang out low down these are kind of like these birds like to be in shrubs and things like that and a lot of the strikes we see do happen close to ground level. If we look at the sparrows white throated sparrows are really vulnerable and we find this has been reported for other in other studies as well. Many about over half of the warblers that we find our white throats and again they're you know sparrows they like to be close to the ground and probably fly up and strike the windows. One of the reasons that in this unknown category most of those are strikes we have not I've been able to identify and that's because you know you see a bird hit and it flies off and you go sparrow and can't figure out what kind of sparrow it is because sparrows can be tricky even on a good day. All right. All right so now where have we been finding birds. We find birds, lots of different places along our route so our routes about two miles long that we rock and there are many many different buildings that have contributed to the data set over the years. But you notice that there are a few buildings that really stand out. And that have our, well, that basically are responsible for most of the collisions. And if we again zoom in a little bit more there's about six buildings in particular that account for almost two thirds of all of the collisions that we see. I'll just real quickly give you those top three. This is a new building that came online and was probably one of the reasons why we saw a big increase in. Most recently this is the new building on 10th Street down kind of at the end of what used to be commercial street across from the narrow gauge railroad in that area. The key features that we know contribute to what why birds hit it's close to the water where the birds are probably coming in, you know, following the water during migration and then they come in and land to rest during the day or, or even at night and then, but there's also nice habitat adjacent to the building trees and shrubs and things for them to take refuge in and there's a lot of glass. The next place building is this one, which is on commercial street. It sits back from the water a little bit but it's basically very close to the waterfront as well. And there's really nice habitat next to it too so there are some very large trees and an alleyway, and the trees are probably attractive to the birds when they're coming into rest during their migration and then when they go to take off from the trees. It's a highly reflective surface that they don't probably perceive as glass and hit it and fall down and so this is kind of pretty lethal alleyway, and, yeah, I'll save Katie to talk a little bit more or Nick about what's going to be happening at this one that this building does have a lot of glass. And then right now, and these two buildings this one on commercial street, and this last one are very similar that right now they are really responsible for the vast majority of our birds that we see hitting this one again is is on the corner of Hancock Street and I guess that's commercial or times hard to say to bread that that and it's right on the waterfront is straight across the street from Ocean Gateway it's the first building that we pretty much a second building maybe that we check on our route. It's got a courtyard in the back and a and the alcove shape is also a way that birds get trapped in there. There's nice habitat right across the street and in this courtyard for the birds and there's just, again, a lot of glass, all of things that make these particularly problematic for birds. So with that, I will stop my part and stop sharing and turn it back over to Nick. Okay. Let me start sharing. Could be a little smoother there we go. So, thank you Chris. That was the route that we take. And here are those sort of highlight here's the route. So those buildings are all on the route around Portland. How did we choose this. And this is the route that we'll be doing every day. You know this is not, you know, we wanted to do a route that would take us by buildings that we thought were more dangerous, which is buildings that have a lot of glass the science has shown repeatedly that you know the number one predictor for how dangerous building is is how much glass is on the facade. We built this route because it takes us by a number of buildings that have a lot of glass but also through a number of buildings that don't have very much glass are, you know, relatively, what we were hoping to do was, you know, tested out in practice. Our birds indeed dying more often against birds buildings that have glass or, and are they dying less often against buildings that don't have as much class. And as you saw from Chris's presentation, you know, absolutely. It's very clear to us now that the science that that, you know, has been developed elsewhere in the country, absolutely applies to Portland, where number one birds are striking against buildings and number two they are striking more often against buildings that have a lot of glass, but we need to continue our monitoring. And so this is the route that we are asking folks to do. Can you see my cursor, Chris, like can you see it. Okay, so this is where we typically start every morning and this is where we're going to start our group walk is where we start every season we start off with a group walk, where everyone is invited to meet and we all walk throughout together. So you can, you know, feel it firsthand. We meet down here at Ocean Gateway. So you all probably know this, this parking lot and building it's that it's the ferry terminal that sort of jets out into the early, not the ferry terminal but the cruise ship terminal, where people meet down there it's a sort of low slung building that has a lot of glass and is a is a bird strike possibility. It's a parking and it's good place to meet so we meet down here at Ocean Gateway. The route then starts by going across to what we know as the Wex building. So this is the building that's one of our, you know, the 20, 23% of all it's the leading building and has been for a number of years in conjunction with the mimic building. Right here we go to mimic we walk down to the sunlight building this was the number three building that Chris mentioned here. We head up, we go down four street, and we look the whole way we don't just wait until we think we're at a place that there might be strikes, you're constantly sort of monitoring the sidewalk for birds. You know, while Chris said that she's right that you know the majority of birds are found in a couple of places, we have found birds that I think over 100 different locations along this route. So birds can be anywhere sometimes they are found at places that don't appear to be a major, you know, threat area. Sometimes they appear just in low numbers at various other places so as we walk we're continually sort of looking on the sidewalk and it's really, that's it, you know you just you simply look on the sidewalk. And you see them as you know small lumps on the sidewalk sometimes they are, if they're injured they may be, you know, huddled against the building, or showing other signs of distress or uncomfortable. Those are good signs that they're that that's a strike. We walk up here along four street. We go up, we cross middle street here all the way down. All the way over here to the TD Bank Plaza. This is a spot now it's used to be. What was it now it's going to be that taco building it's that sort of odd almond shaped class building in the TD Bank courtyard. We go across the street to one city center. We walk up to the library here. We go down over to Congress Street up to the workout anytime building this is where we sort of turn. And this is a 24 hour fitness building that is probably number four on the list of strikes we find a lot of birds in there, and have and have discussed them with them about remediation issues. We go from there down to the cross insurance arena. And this I'm looking at is this. It's actually a little different than the route that we do now you said TD Bank you meant canal Plaza before Nick, not TD Bank because then we come down the TD Bank Plaza after cross insurance. Okay. So we need to update this map a little bit, because I think usually what we do now is come down here. From cross insurance down Spring Street and then down here right. Yeah. Okay, so. And that's the TD Bank Plaza okay I'm sorry. So we need to update this map, and I apologize this is correct but but I'm going to send out some materials. Next week, or yeah probably next early next week, and it'll have the update of maps on it but generally we walk down here, let me come down through the TD Bank Plaza, there's this big sort of beautiful courtyard here with a lot of vegetation what what you find is when you do this walk is that areas of vegetation of Portland are just bird magnets. So on days of heavy migration, whatever trees, you know they may not look like much but whatever sort of small parks and trees you find are full of birds. And there's sort of a little unofficial park down here, the TD Bank Plaza, where there's lots of bird activity and consequently the potential for lots of strikes. So we come down through there and then down to the mimic building here. So the mimic building it including that the alley behind mimic is one of the leading areas for bird strikes. And I, I guess I'll just spill the beans sorry Katie. We have been working with with mimic for a number of years about potential mediation back there. It's a very expensive process but Katie learned as she was doing a sort of route preview the other day that they are indeed moving forward with some birds on the windows back there so we're very excited about that. And are eager to see how it is installed through the year and what impacts it might have so that's great news. So we typically go from mimic, we don't actually usually go down to Baxter Place anymore. We haven't found many birds down there we have other volunteers who sometimes come that way. Generally, we go from mimic back down four street past this big glass parking garage, and some other garages, and then work our way back on commercial street chemistry back to ocean gateway. That's typically how the route goes. I will talk in a little bit about, you know, once we sign up and we have a number of volunteers, what we can do with the route in terms of mixing it up or starting in different places. So that's generally how the route goes through the city. I'm going to talk a little bit more towards the end here about how the route goes but I want to turn it over to Katie now to talk about the most important thing you can do on the route, which is taking photos. Or even if you're not walking the route, I guess. Can I can I control the slides myself or I don't think so if that's okay. There's no way to do that right. I don't think so. Okay, you can just start it. Okay, so the three things we're looking for in photos and sometimes this isn't always possible, because frequently birds, especially if they're stunned can be difficult to get the perfect picture of and any picture is better than no picture that's definitely worth saying. So we're looking for them to be clear, identifiable, and ideally evocative as well because we do use these in any kind of press that we participate in so this is an example of something that's not that great. You can see it's from pretty far away. You can see the building, but you can't really see the bird and as often these photos are being sent to us to identify it's the best and we can actually really see the bird, but we are looking for photos of it near the building, and then close up photos of the bird itself so both are great. But this isn't a great example the next one is a is a good example of what. The good picture is this is both clear and identifiable this is a female common yellow throat, you can see the belly you can see the throat, and you can see the side, ideally you would have a side a top and a bottom photo, just to make it super clear. Yeah, keep going. This is a good way to show the building show the bird make it evocative and also make it identifiable. I think our wonderful volunteers has gloves on when handling the birds that's recommended if you're going to pick up the birds and move them anywhere gloves are generally recommended. Or if you do pick it up, don't like touch your face and wash your hands after this one's a tricky one I'm sure it was difficult lighting because we do monitor early in the morning, but sometimes flash can help with the camera and really holding that camera, steady or even picking the bird up because this one is hard to identify. These are both great. Ideally, these would be paired with images that also show the back and heads of the bird, because that can frequently be really useful for identification. The next thing for that that I can point out is the one on the right is actually a juvenile male common yellow throat, which you can tell because there's some black feathering on the face, but from, you know, like a bottom angle that might just look like a female common yellow throat and understanding sex and age of the birds is helpful for us in determining whether those are factors contributing to higher collision rates for them. It's awesome to really easy to identify that bird for us. Good clear image. The one to the right is evocative in a way but it's difficult to identify so this would be okay as long as it's paired with an image that someone on our side can be identifying the bird. Well, that's all we have. There we go. Yeah, if the bird is stunned my last recommendation is like this picture here it is good to get an evocative picture of them obviously be careful that you're not stressing the bird out necessarily sometimes those pictures aren't going to be perfect but you want to give them as good a chance to recover as possible so that's my last thought. Thanks Katie. So yeah photos are really important here this photos are you know what changes this especially for decision makers and builders from something theoretical to something real. You know nobody wants to be responsible for killing birds. And the truth of the matter is that, although you know lots and lots of birds strike buildings this is this is a fairly easy problem to not notice. You know birds are eaten by dolls birds are eaten by rodents when they're on the sidewalk and so they don't last very long and so it's easy not to know the scope of this problem. I mean that's our job is to let people know that this actually is indeed a problem and it's happening in Portland at these very specific buildings. So that's why taking of taking photos is so helpful plus there's a scientific element of course of helping us understand exactly what species are hitting and you know what ages and and timings. So how do we do it, how does it actually happen so the good news is in the fall, it happens a little later in the, in the day than the spring. Typically we time our routes to begin at dawn, because birds migrate at night. During the day they come out of the skies as they, you know seek shelter and safety for the day, and then they wait for nightfall for they migrate again. So in the at dawn when they're coming out of the skies, you know they don't really know where they are they come down wherever they are. And if that's in a city then they have to figure out how to navigate the city and find safety and so that's when they're sort of most susceptible to strikes. So we start at dawn, but unlike in the spring when dawn is like 5am dawn in the falls a little later so we start our walks at 630am in the fall and we actually can go even later than that. Even in October. We start as I said the Ocean Gateway building. There's typically plenty of places the park early morning down there. You can bring whatever you'd like. Typically, you know, the main goal here is is comfort. So bring some shoes you can walk in the route is about two miles. It usually about, you know, takes an hour or so. And so being comfortable walking is extremely important here. And so bring comfortable shoes where the clothing you need to go. One thing we don't ask, we don't require is that if you find a dead bird that you keep it or hold on to it, we actually, we actually don't need the birds. So one or two seasons there we had a volunteer who was collecting birds for a, for a parasite study, but we no longer sort of need the carcasses and so you don't need to collect birds we ask you to, you know, move them out of the way. If you feel comfortable doing that picking them up and placing them either under a bush or just sort of not right on the sidewalk anymore. But you don't need to to hold on to the bird. So you don't actually need Ziploc bags or things like that. You can carry paper bags with you paper bag can be used if you're looking to rehabilitate a bird. We sort of leave it up to volunteers about what they want to do with injured birds. When a bird has been injured in a strike. The truth is that there's, well, there's a debate about how effective rebel will be rehabilitation is. When a bird strikes me and these are tiny, very light creatures, and they are subjected to sometimes internal injuries that can be very hard for to fix. And sometimes the process of handling them and getting them to safety can just simply add to the danger. But we do partner with a being haven they have volunteers in Portland to are willing to come in and help bring a bird to rehabilitate her if that's what you'd like. Typically what we try to do with with stunned birds is we move them out of the way. So the process of moving a bird can be very difficult. But if a bird is actively actively sort of moving away from you, if you approach it then just simply stop and let the bird recover on its own chasing the bird is more dangerous than leaving it be. But often birds will not, you know, be in a state where they are not trying to evade you. If that case you can carefully pick them up and what I do is move them to a bush or a tree somewhere not on the ground where they have a better chance of, you know, being taken by a cat or not being stepped on or something and give them a chance to recover. So you have some opportunities and options there. But please take pictures. We really use those pictures as Katie mentioned. And for the day, we have a little bit of a new system this year, where the group leader will will be responsible for emailing photos and information to to us but you take note of what time you found the bird, what what the address you found it at. If you'd like to try to identify it that's great but but Katie and I and Chris can identify the bird and any other notes that you think would be relevant. And email. When you're done. First of all, the best part of it being the fall is that the coffee shops are open in the spring. It's your like yours doesn't drive home before you get coffee. There's plenty of things that you drink importantly congratulate yourself for for doing a good deed. You have the whole day ahead of you you're up and you've got taken got your exercise. You want to email the photos you found on here it says my address and Chris's address. I should put just the bird strike address on there. And I'll send this information tomorrow. And how do we begin the group walk is on September 6. This is a really fun. Actually event we get a whole bunch of people out on the street. We walk around together looking for birds. We generally find birds every every group walk I don't think I've done a fall group especially we haven't found a bird. Springs a little different but so it'll you can see what happens when you when you find a bird. So if you have a packet I'll be sending volunteers next week there'll be a waiver that we we ask volunteers to sign. And then you can put your name into the spreadsheet now we're putting that spreadsheet in the chat just now. And you'll see how the sign up process works. So that is that let me get the spreadsheet right here. And we will say that I don't think Nick you haven't mentioned anything about rain yet have you. Yeah so I mean if it's it's totally up to the volunteers if they want to walk. Most of our volunteers are super dedicated and they still go out regardless of the weather however. You know if it's really raining hard we don't expect much bird activity. And so it's not essential that you go out, even when it's raining is sometimes if it's a light rain or missed you know we get the fog around here. Yeah we will still go out. And the other thing Nick did you want to mention about the birdcast website. There is a website. I'll get it right now. From Cornell, which is incredibly accurate and intriguing. There it is right there at forecasting bird migration so every night they analyze the wind directions and the weather patterns. You know typical species movements. And they can can give an estimate of what's going to happen that night. And so you as a volunteer can look and see like oh my goodness all these birds are moving tonight. This is what I might see before. Yeah Jim we as a group try to walk every day volunteers can do whatever they want. That could be typically what I do is once a week. So the amount of volunteers we have. If folks want to go more than once a week that's awesome if you want to do once or twice a fall that's fine too if you whatever works for schedules. If you are going on vacation and aren't around totally fine, you know we'll figure it out. We are lucky to have a pretty good volunteer turnout after a couple years of this and so it should be fine. So without that. Yeah we're doing a different thing for the, for the contact. Sorry. But but check out this sheet here. The sheet. Well you have all the dates, and it'll let you pick what you want. Yeah, we're going to put the contact list on the same sheet. Yeah, we were. We haven't. We've got a different sheet what do we decide to do Katie with the contact sheet. We used to have it on a different time difficulty using it. Institute into like a different thing in that in the drive so people could access it easier. Okay, let me get that for you right now. Yep. So, and this is the volunteer contact sheet. This is where people can put your information. It's, we found it's very helpful for groups to coordinate the night before. And I'll tell you why in a second, but so if, if folks can just be like hey, is everyone going out tomorrow, or do you want to meet at 630 blah, blah, blah. Yeah, I'm not sharing my screen hopefully those links are in the chat. Yeah, they're there. Okay. Yeah, they are in the chat. Why not just share my screen though. Just so we can all see it. So if you guys want to look together. So here's the the volunteer contact sheet. So names are in here so you just look at who else is doing the volunteering at that time and you can reach out. Here's the sign up sheet. Thanks to folks who are look and see we're we're almost filled up already. It does though at this point still look like we're a little bit lower than normal. What we like to do if we have, you know, so like this day, where Christina husband are going out and then Deborah and Kara going in. We have four people on a route what we can do is walk the route differently. So we do ask it every day that somebody walks the normal route which is stopping at Ocean Gate starting an Ocean Gateway and then going around and coming back to Ocean Gateway. If you have a lot of volunteers, you could have someone start say at mimic, and then do the route and so you're walking two routes at the same time. We do miss birds, and I'll tell you, gulls important are no exactly the sound of a bird striking a building and come down to get a meal. And so if we're not there fairly quickly, the birds may be gone so it is helpful, if possible to have people walk the route in multiple ways. So those are the two sign up things that are helpful to use. Yep. And so just for everybody's sake, the first walk. We always do start out with the group walk on the sixth. And after that, it's pairs of people two to four people, sometimes more that go out. And yeah, we try to get coverage at least two people every single day and even though Portland's a pretty safe area and some people are perfectly fine walking the route by themselves. It's usually nice just to have at least two people every day if we can get them. Yeah. And a new thing that we're doing for this fall is something called the group leader. This is just someone who is responsible for reaching out to responsible for two things it's not a big responsibility but it's making sure that there's a you're connecting with people before the night before you go so just send a text to the group to say hey we're so good. And then make sure the photos get sent in at the end of the day. That's all which just helps to have someone in charge there. And then if for some reason you can't go on a certain day, you know that's perfectly fine we know things happen. If you could just remove your name from the list to because we also kind of keep track of just effort. And this kind of thing helps us for when it comes time to actually use the data for various reasons. So if you could remove your name if you know you're not going to go out. That's great. We don't touch 630 still can be early. Yeah. I find I'll tell you that it's I feel great when I'm done, you know you're two mile walk in. I'm sorry Katie, I must how long it usually takes. Yeah, if you don't find any birds, you can do it in about an hour. It kind of depends on just how fast you walk and then yeah and then if you find if you start finding birds, it'll take longer just because you're photographing people like bike and run the walk to as long as you're taking adequate time to like look, especially at the specific locations for birds and not just you know like biking by really quickly. Yeah, people have also done that and that's quicker. Yeah, some people take longer some people just to chat and and stroll around to you know it's a nice way to get your steps in. Any other questions. I thank everyone for joining Marcia asked a question. The group leader is we've just made it the first. Yeah, column in the sign up sheet so that whoever signs up in that first column is the designated group leader for that day so self determined, but just for the day. You're volunteering to be the group leader as well as to walk that day. So, thanks again for everyone for coming, you know this has been a really exciting project for us we are making a lot of policy progress. This is an area of environmental study that is undergoing a lot of, you know, growth and and change and movement in recent years and it's really exciting to be a part of it. But we can't do any of it without the data, you know the data that we've gathered the hard events that we have from the streets of Portland and from around Maine has really has been everything to us in terms of making progress in Maine so we thank you all in advance. I will be sending out some more information, I think next week to the folks here and to other volunteers who didn't join. And I hope to see everyone on the group walk it's not required to go on the group walk, but it is a fun way to meet people and to do it all together. All right. Thanks everyone. Thanks Katie and Chris. And we'll talk to you soon. Thanks everybody.