 for bearing for bearing with us through the storm. I did not have power until Saturday. I know many others were had a tough time as well. I hope everyone is safe and sound and all our trees are standing. But it's good to be with you. So I'll give it just just another minute. I do see a person triggering on. Some familiar things. Yeah, hello, everyone. Amy are one of our trustees. Wendy, Sarah, Debbie Gru. Hello, everyone. Chris and I presented for the OSHER Lifetime Learning Institute today slash SAGE. I don't know, I forget what SAGE stands for. What does SAGE stand for? I can't remember either. Something. And that was great. So we've been talking birds safe throughout the day, and we're going to keep on rolling. That time of year. That time of year. And I might as well just start going. I guess knowing there was only so many people on, we should have done a meeting format so I could have seen everyone, but that's all right. We're in a webinar format. So what that means is hopefully, I don't know if I've allowed everybody to talk to each other. Attendees can chat with everyone. Okay, so now folks can use the chat if you'd like to. That'll make it a little easier. Unfortunately, using this webinar format, I can't, it doesn't let me let you turn your video on, but oh well. And so put questions in the chat or down below and we'll be talking about what we're doing this spring. We are entering our, well, this is the end of our fourth season of rat walking, correct? Yeah, we started in the fall of 2020. So this is wrapping up our fourth season of BirdSafeMain, a program that Chris and I are very excited about. Something we, that frankly, I don't think we can believe we're still doing it. It's pretty awesome that this has really grown and taken on a life of its own. And we've had really great successes here in Portland and around the state that we're excited to share with you. The, this is the, this would be the eighth edition of this particular webinar. Well, we, where we talk about what we're doing to potential new volunteers, and see if they're interested in joining us walking routes in the city, or otherwise helping us out with the work we do. So, Chris, anything you want to add before I jump in? No, go for it. All right, let me jump in and let me just make sure. Let me do this. That's going to look weird for a second. Actually, give me one second. I'm flustered because of my internet. So let me just set this up a little different way quickly. Yeah, we'll do this. Okay. Gonna look funky for a second, but then it's going to look beautiful, right? You can see that, Chris? Yes, we can. All right, my friends. Hello, I'm Nick Lund from Maine Audubon, the state's oldest and largest wildlife conservation organization. Maine Audubon is great. If you're not a member, please be a member. I'm joined by Dr. Chris Mayer from the beautiful campus of USM, which I was on today, and I hadn't seen it. I used to, I graduated from the University of Maine School of Law, which is right, used to be down over near USM, and beautiful campus, many more buildings. I guess it being 60 degrees helped things out a little bit. But I'm joined by her. Chris and I are co-founders of BirdSafe Maine, which is a program that works to educate and take action on the problem of bird glass collisions. This is a collaboration between Maine Audubon, the Portland Society for Architecture, USM, and Avian Haven. That's their logo up top. They are wildlife rehabilitators in Maine. This is what we're talking about. We're talking about birds that have collided it with glass and died or are injured. This is a problem that the scientific community is just sort of waking up to in the past decade or so. Thanks in part to groups like ours, to who are raising awareness and finding hard data on the streets and on our back decks. It may seem like a niche problem or not a big deal, but it is a big deal. This is a slide from the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, which shows human-caused avian mortality around the country. So reasons that birds have died because of humans. And the couple things you want to point out at the top there is building glass collisions. So Scott Laws is the scientist who's done a lot of great studies about bird glass collisions, including estimating numbers. The estimated range of bird deaths per year in this country only from glass collisions is between $365 million and $988 million, with a median guess of about $600 million. That's individual birds per year. So what that means on the low end, about 1 million birds per day are dying after sliding the windows. To put that in context a little bit, that is one second place basically in estimated bird deaths from human causes behind cats, which are an exponentially greater 1.4 billion on the low end, billion with a B. But compared to say land-based wind turbines, of which there are about 78,000 wind turbines in the country, you can see that only about between 140,000 and 230,000 birds, which is still a lot of birds, not something we're negating, but many, many thousands and millions fewer than building glass collisions. This is a big, big problem. In our urban areas, it peaks during migration, which we are about to embark on right now. It's actually started already, spring migration, the birders' favorite time of the year, the time we dream about, wait for all year, we suffer through boring cold March 4, just to get to April and especially May. This is when you have birds on the move, right? So three and a half billion birds, passerine birds mostly fly from their wintering grounds in the Southeast US or the Caribbean or Mexico, Central America or South America, up into the US. About two and a half billion of those fly through up to the boreal forests of Canada where they're going to breed. In the fall, there are four billion that come out of Canada. Of course, they all had babies over the summer, and so they're more in the fall than in the spring. Work their way south through the US. They pick up about a billion more in the US and work their way further south to their breeding grounds. This is a major movement of species and a real sort of incredible natural phenomenon. The landscape that they are moving over looks a whole lot different now than it did a hundred years ago, 200 years ago, right? Humans have changed the landscape that these birds are migrating through and made it much more hazardous for them to get on their way. Basically, the way it works is that birds take off and fly at nighttime. It's there are fewer predators at night. They can use the stars for navigation. It's usually calmer. And so they fly at night. And when the sun comes up, they come down, they come down wherever they get to. They don't know where they are. They don't sort of have a goal in mind necessarily, they get to where they get to and they come out. That could they come, they may come out at a big, beautiful national park or forest and have plenty of room to to find food and safety. They may come out in an urban area. And there's a whole lot of urban areas on the East Coast. If they find themselves in an urban area, they find themselves without a lot of trees and places to to take cover without a lot of food. And they have to sort of fend for themselves, find their way to better habitat or ride the day out until nighttime. It comes again, they can take off again. One thing they are increasingly encountering when they come out of the sky is glass. So glass is the number one, the amount of glass on a building is the number one predictor for how many birds will collide. Glass is a fascinating object. It's it's not something that is found in nature, not something that birds are used to, of course, and a substance that tricks them in a number of ways. It is reflective, right? So as birds are flying along, they see the sky reflected in glass windows and they think they're flying through the sky. They don't know what buildings are, they don't know to look out for glass. And so they think they're flying to safety and they instead collide with glass. Actually, probably more often they think they're flying from vegetation to vegetation. So as glass reflects vegetation, these are areas that especially small birds are looking to move into to find safety and food. And so they're darting through open areas back to vegetation. They see what they think is a safe place to be and instead it's a glass window. So glass is reflective, but it's also transparent, right? This, I was introduced to this work when I worked in Washington DC for a group called Lights Out DC. And what we did then in, you know, 2012 or so was we walked around the streets of DC early in the mornings trying to find birds. We were, the science was even less settled at that point and we didn't know what it was about certain buildings that would be dangerous to birds. So we were just trying to find out everything we could. This building, the Thurgood Marshall Judiciary Building near Union Station in DC was one of the most dangerous on our route. The reason is because this building is basically two big square stone buildings connected by this big glassed in atrium there. And the atrium at nighttime, here it is at nighttime, is lit up from within. And there are these trees planted in the middle of the atrium. The trees are, you know, a beacon basically for these migratory birds. And they come and they hit the glass, which is invisible when lit from within. Lights are also a factor here. Lights are, we know that lights contribute to or play a role in attracting birds. This is the tribute in light it's called in New York City. And all those little, those white specks up there are birds that are illuminated here. It's a little, the science is still evolving about what exactly it is that brings birds to light. The most likely candidate is that insects, as we know, are attracted to lights and birds are coming in to find the insects. But studies have proven time and again, especially at this tribute in light that, so what they do here is they turn it off and on every every after a period of time. When the lights are off, there's basically an even distribution of migratory birds throughout the sky. This is of course in September when there are birds moving south. When the lights are on, there is a massive collection of thousands of birds that come to the light. These are super bright lights. So light does play a role, but glass has shown to be the most dangerous aspect of this. And so what we do at BirdSafeMain is trying to is work on this problem in Portland. We'll talk about that a little more specifically later, but we are advocating for solutions. There's all kinds of things you can do to make a building that is safe for birds. These buildings are all glass. This building on the right has a cool metal screen around it. This building on the left has a combination of sort of fritted glass and frosted glass. This building here is the Javits Center in New York City. This is this same building. This, for the longest time, was the deadliest building in New York City, as you may imagine, for bird strikes. This building has a number of extremely dangerous features. Of course, it's clad in glass, so it reflects the sky. It reflects habitat that you can see down here. It has a number of, it has pass-through glass, so where birds can look in one window and see out another window, like over here. I don't know if you can see my cursor on the screen, but you can see through though, so pass-through is dangerous. Glass corners are dangerous where a bird can see, like right here, can see through to the other side through glass. This building is like a perfect storm of the worst bird safe practices. They worked with New York City Audubon to retrofit the entire building with this particular glass. This is called fritted glass, where ceramic dots are printed on the pane before it's installed. In this building, even though it still looks like this, so this is a post-retrofit picture, it still has all the stuff you want of a glass building. It's all lit from within, and there's lots of sunlight, of course, cut their strikes by more than 90% after those frits were fitted. So there are, the products work. All kinds of other products out there. These are acid-etched glasses, glasses, or other panels. Anything that you can do, and this is just general, this isn't really, but anything you can do to let a bird know that there's a window there is going to work, right? That's all you need to do is give a bird some sort of visual clue that this thing is not the sky or habitat, but is a dangerous window. So it could be fancy patterns. It could be not having gigantic windows, right? So brick buildings are a fantastic bird safe tool. It could be insect screens that you put on your windows. It could be mullions. It could be other patterns, anything, paint that kids or artists paint, hanging cords, anything that you can you can put on the outside of your window to increase its visibility to birds and makes it bird safe. So in Maine, and I should say, probably I should have said earlier, this webinar is basically broken up into two halves. So one is people who want to volunteer in Portland. And in a few slides, I will transition to more Portland-specific information. And then the first half, which I've been talking about, is sort of a general overview for people who are interested generally, but may not be able to volunteer in Portland. So just so we know that. But so bird safe Maine was founded between Chris and I four years ago. And Portland Society of Architecture to do something about this, to raise awareness, try to protect birds, what we do at Maine Audubon. And we've had some great success there. We are, there's a lot of sort of angles in to the education piece, especially this bird safe issue is not something that there's a lot of awareness of, especially among architects. So folks graduate architecture school without knowing anything about the dangers of class. So we're really out here to educate them. And we've had a number of successes already. This is LL Bean's new headquarters in Freeport. We worked with them to install about 19,000 square feet of these decals on their back windows facing a big forest back there. After they built this new building and then some employees were complaining and having a hard time doing work because so many birds were crashing into their office windows. We installed 19,000 square feet of these dots back there, the largest retrofit that we're aware of in New England. And a fantastic job. I mean, there are no laws in Maine that require any company to take action on bird safe architecture. And so LL Bean did this because they're a good company and wanted to do right by their employees. We've had similar successes working with the Memic Company in the building they occupy in downtown Portland. We work with Saddleback Mountain up north on a new lodge that they're building to make it bird safe for Big Nels Rush and other birds. Employees at Bigelow Labs in East Booth Bay work to put decals all over the building and more and growing numbers. So we've had a lot of success sort of tackling some projects. We've also fairly incredibly had success in the state legislature. Last session, Representative Sophie Warren from Scarborough introduced a bill. This is after we've been working for three years and had gotten a lot of the word out there to folks in Maine to introduce a bill to deal with, you know, to start the process of dealing with bird safe architecture. And it got passed, believe it or not. Maine Audubon's advocacy in action got this bill passed. Maine is now one of just four states in the country that has taken statewide action on bird safe architecture. This bill, LD670, doesn't require anything, but we're going down the process of developing guidelines for bird safety in the use of public buildings. So really our idea here is to just raise awareness. If you can get to an architect before they've built a building and you can get them to think about bird safety, it's much easier and much cheaper to build a bird safe building than it is to build a javelin center and come back and replace all the glass. And so this legislation is a really incredible step in that direction to get people thinking more and more about bird safe architecture in Maine. The other thing we are working on is an ordinance in the city of Portland. There's only a couple states have taken statewide action, but there's about two dozen or so municipalities around the country, including big cities like New York and Washington DC that have taken past bird safe ordinances for their cities. And that's something we are working on in the city of Portland. So over the summer of 2022 and into 2023 and now still going, we pulled together a big group of architects in Portland to understand what the latest best practices were from these municipal ordinances and design our own for Portland. And we're very proud of this ordinance. We were about to take it in front of the city council, but things got delayed and then the election happened and now the city council looks different, so we are resetting a little bit. Tomorrow evening, 24 hours from now, I will be probably waiting to talk, but maybe talking to the sustainability and transportation committee of the Portland City Council to re-engage their support and then hopefully take this to the council again. We're very excited and optimistic about this effort and continue to do great things. There's a whole lot I haven't mentioned. Chris, do you want to jump in and say anything about the other work we're doing? I think you're good so far. I didn't know if you wanted any to show any results or anything like that if we were just to show what we found in the past because I've got slides queued up. Let me do that in a minute after I show them that. So we do tons of stuff. We have developed a curriculum that is being employed in schools, most notably Yarmouth Elementary School, which just responded by installing permanent measures on some of their windows out there. We are working to contact installers to help understand these new products. We're doing a lot of great stuff and we need help. If you want to help out, please let us know. There's a lot of ways that you can help out that doesn't evolve volunteering on the streets of Portland. The number one way is just to let us know if you find strikes. So this in migration is an urban problem because birds are finding themselves in cities where they're usually not, but bird strikes are a four-season problem at residences in your houses. So if you have a window that you find birds on, please let us know. Here's some information here about where to send a photograph and a date and your address. That way you can put it in our big database of bird strikes. If the bird is injured, you can call Diane, our volunteer from Avian Haven and she'll come help you out with that. And then we'd be happy to talk with you about different products if you're interested in treating your windows. You can also become involved in other ways if you want. Chris and I are on the leadership team here at BirdSafe Maine, which meets regularly to talk about these issues and move forward and we're just a great group. So that is the statewide portion of the presentation and now I will move into the sort of bread and butter and what we're talking about today, which is walking around, walking around the streets of Portland. When we started this program in 2020, the idea was to try to ground truth the signs. So there are studies out there that show a lot of things about how birds strike in cities, which species strike most often, what times they strike, and then most importantly that birds strike more often against glass buildings than they do against, say, a brick building. So our goal was just to ground truth that. Let's get some folks out there, walk in the streets and see what we can see. So what we've done every fall and spring migration since 2020 for six weeks generally in the spring and for eight weeks walking every morning in the fall is walk a route throughout the city of Portland that runs past a number of sort of new glass heavy buildings and then maybe more traditional less glass buildings and see what we can see. Are we going to find birds? We're not going to find birds. Guess what? Spoiler alert, we found birds. We find lots of birds. We have proven everything that we have set out to prove basically with this project in Portland. We have found exactly the birds that the science taught us to expect on exactly the days that they taught us to expect and we find them most often against glass buildings. Simple as that. This work is the basis of everything we've done. The images that we have, the ground truthing from the streets is what enables us to go to this place like the city council and say this is a problem. Look, we found it. This is what we do when we volunteer. We walk around, we don't wear masks anymore. This was from Portland Press, Harold Darkville in 2020 where I'm asking if we want to, but we walk around and we look for birds on the streets. This is as simple as that. We have lots of great volunteers. Our best might be the Callenberg kids who come in from Cousins Island usually every Sunday to have to find birds and they find a ton of them and we do find a ton of them. It can be difficult at times. I would say on average, especially in the spring, as Chris will tell in a minute, we generally find fewer birds in the spring than we do in the fall for a number of reasons. And sometimes you don't find any birds that's common, especially in the spring, but sometimes you do and that can be everything from this white-throated sparrow here to this Swainsons thrush in the hands there to the common yellow throat stunned in the hands there to this Savannah sparrow upside down on the bottom. This is our route and potential volunteers can, we'll get to know this. Our first walk is, it's Thursday the 18th, right Chris? Yeah, thank you Amy for correcting me that over email. Thursday, April 18th is our first walk. Our tradition is to do a group walk. So we invite all the volunteers who might want to join us for the year out on the streets. We start here at Ocean Gateway down off Thames Street, off Commercial Street, and we start there and we walk this route. It's about two miles, it takes about an hour. It can be more or less depending on how fast you walk or how many birds you find. This takes us past a number of sort of glass-heavy buildings, including some of our traditionally most dangerous buildings like this building, the Wex building or the Sun Life building here. It brings you back around past plenty of less dangerous buildings and then back to Ocean Gateway. It's fun, dare I say, in the spring. We get out early in the morning. This is always a difficult part of this conversation. We start at 5.30 in the morning in the spring. The idea here is that you want to get burst as they're coming out of the sky from their migrations and you want to get them before the gulls get to them. Gulls eat birds. They hit the sidewalks. If you're a gull and you're used to eating whatever you can get your little beak around, a nice fresh songbird is a meal for you. And so it's very common for us to chase, you know, be in a foot race with gulls to get to a bird and we miss uncountable birds that gulls get to before we can get there. So we get out there early but you are done early and you can get home in time for a nice restful coffee or whatever, another nap maybe before you go. Let me turn it over to Chris now and she will talk about some of the things we found. Let's see if I can share and find some more slides. So just for those people who maybe want to know sort of what we have found, let's see, hopefully this will, I can't see it down there at the bottom. There we go. Oh, come on. All right, let's try this instead. Okay, so this is just a little bit of data to kind of show you what we have found over the last three spring seasons. Just showing the mean number of birds here starting at April 18th. It starts out kind of slow and these are just error bars to give you an idea of the variability. But it's usually, as Nick mentioned, we don't see as many birds in the spring as we do in the fall partly because these birds of all made it through a winter and have migrated safely down to their wintering grounds and are heading back. So they have some experience and they just maybe haven't made it all the way through. So fewer birds but they're heading north. But what you see too is that there's this peak right here, which is exactly when we expect to see a peak given what we know about migrants through Maine in about middle of May and then it tapers off again there. So, but yes, but it's pretty steady leading up until that peak. And then these data are just kind of showing you, A, what we find and B, kind of what you can expect in terms of the three categories of birds that we do find. So first thing I want to show you over the four fall seasons, I mean, notice that we do see more birds in the fall than we do in the spring. But spring is also, you know, we are finding birds. And there is variability from year to year. Fall 2022 was a particularly bad year, not exactly sure where, why, whether may have had something to do with it. It's hard to know. Maybe there was a big boom on the breeding grounds that year too, and just a lot of birds were produced. But you also notice that there's three categories of birds that we find. And by far, the most birds that we find are found dead. So a little over half, about 57% of the birds that we find are dead on the sidewalk. That's in the green bars here. And then there's also birds that are stunned. So these are still alive and they're in various states of distress, we'll say. Some birds are, you know, given enough time, we'll probably recover and fly away. And sometimes they do that right in front of you. They just take off. If we do, when we do find stunned birds, we, if you're comfortable doing this, we will kind of move them to a secure location, just maybe under a bush someplace. So they're not right out in the middle of the sidewalk where somebody could potentially step on them or a gull might find it easier to get them. And so just to give them a safe place to sort of recover. Many of those birds, unfortunately, probably do succumb to their injuries, blood trauma. It's hard to tell what has actually happened to those birds. And then the third category of birds that we see are strikes. So this is when the bird just bounces against the glass, hits the window and then flies off. It can be really challenging to identify those birds, but we do count those as well. And then in terms of what birds we find, oh, let's try that again. There we go. By far, the vast majority of birds that we find are songbirds. Again, that's given, that's not surprising given that we're looking at these, walking around during migration when these birds are moving through. We've found something like 23 different families of birds, but by far, most of them are sparrows and warblers. And again, that's partly because those are the birds that are coming through Portland at that time of the year. And so that's what we expect to see. That's what we other people have found as well. And if we drill down a little bit more and look at those two families, we see that within the warbler group, let's see, it's about 19 species of birds that we found. And common yellow throats are by far the most vulnerable. Again, that's what other folks have found too. These common yellow throats are kind of shrubby. They like shrubby areas low down. So when they kind of take off from their purchase, they're going to hit those low places where the glass may be reflecting back at them. So you see quite a few common yellow throats. But what's also interesting based on what we found is there's not an insignificant number of black pole warblers that strike buildings. And that's important to know because that's a threatened species in Maine and about 6% of the birds that hit at the warblers are black poles in there. If we look at the sparrows, it's the white-throated sparrows that are the most vulnerable by far here. About half of the birds, half of the sparrows that we find are white-throated sparrows. And again, all the sparrows are those kind of low. They like to hang out low in the vegetation. Swamp sparrows are another vulnerable species. And you also notice that there's a lot of unknowns in the strike category here. And that's because sparrows are notoriously challenging to identify even when they're sitting on the sidewalk right in front of you. But then you see this bird stripe, you could tell it's a sparrow and you're not sure which one it is. So that kind of gives you an idea of some of the birds that we have found and where we find birds. So we told you when and which birds. We find birds all along the route at various places, a total of about 77 different locations now that we've tallied up. But as Nick said, there's some bird buildings that are much more deadly than others. And it comes down to basically six buildings that are taking, that are counting for about 75% or three quarters of all the bird collisions. So we have six buildings that are the biggest culprit. And I'll just quickly mention the top three, which Nick has kind of already alluded to. This is a new building, well, relatively new building now on Thames Street down in the Portland 4 complex, that area. This is our third place birds, third place building in terms of birds. And some of the reasons for that is because it's right along the water. So chances are birds are following the shoreline, they're going to kind of settle down in this area. There's habitat right adjacent to this. It's along the East End Trail. So there's habitat nearby. And there's just a lot of glass on this building that reflect the sunlight, especially as the sun's coming up. Another building that's been a problem about one in four birds are hitting here is 261 Commercial Street. And some of the reasons for this is because of just the design of the building and the habitat that's nearby. So this is an alley that runs between the building and a parking garage for the Portland Harbor Hotel. And there's some really tall trees here that are planted literally on top of the parking garage and probably stick out like a little beacon for birds that are looking for a place to settle and rest during the day. The unfortunate thing is that then when they go to take off, they run right into this reflective building next to there and then drop down onto the alley behind it. So again, and it's also right across the street from the water as well. So combination of things that are kind of lethal with all that glass there. And then the top building that has been responsible for birds along our route again, very close in number about one in four is this building at the corner of Hancock and Thames. Again, this directly across the street from Ocean Gateway Terminal so it's right near the water. There's nice habitat around it. And then one of the features of this building in the back on the backside of it away from the waterfront is this little courtyard here which has an L shaped kind of courtyard that acts as a funnel and sort of can trap the birds in there and makes it hard for them to get out again along with some nice plantings and just a lot of glass in that area. And just real quick though, a little shout out and Nick had mentioned this before, this is that building 261 Memmick Street which houses Memmick, the insurance company. You see here just looking at the percentage of birds found, we find quite a few birds there, but there's been this interesting drop last fall in fall 2023 in the number of birds we find there. And just to refresh your memory, this is what that habitat looks like. We've got the courtyard here with all those tall trees and this nice reflection there. Well, what happened in fall 2023 is that the Memmick installed window treatments on hairs, put in some film. And you can see that, I think, in these slides. There are little dot patterns here on those windows. So they actually did treated that whole courtyard side of the building with those dot patterns. And there's a nice correlation between when that treatment went up and when we were seeing fewer bird strike. Now that install wasn't complete last fall. So that's one of the reasons why we are heading back out there this spring in particular and walking the same route. Just to see now that that is complete if we continue to see that drop in numbers, which would be a really cool thing to see. So I will stop sharing. And so that gives you an idea sort of of some of the things that we have found and some of the cool work that our our data have already come to fruition on. All right, Nick, back to you. I'm going to unmute myself. Thank you, Chris. We are finding things and we are doing great work and we love you to work with us. I'll come back to this maybe because there's a great question from Amy Weicker in the chat about do we need do we ask the volunteers to identify the bird? No, don't need you to identify the bird. It's hard to identify birds and don't worry about it. What we do ask you to do is take a picture. Taking a picture has been a very important advocacy tool for us because photos of these birds are undeniable, right? These are sad, heart-wrenching pictures and when they are on the street, you know where it is and it's hard if you're a building owner or, you know, a city official to say, pretend this problem doesn't exist when you have a picture showing it. And so instead of, you know, folks are welcome to identify birds if you want, but no, you just have to try to take a picture. Or we had a fellow last summer who helped us with this work and she put together, Katie Netland was her name, put together a great slide about a couple slides about taking good pictures and I'll just run through this very quickly. What you want is clear, identifiable, and evocative, if possible. It reflects your photojournalist muscles for this effort. A picture like this is not going to change minds and hearts, probably. It's not clear. I would say white thorned sparrow or white crown sparrow down there. Not a super helpful picture, but this is, right? It's less important for us to know exactly the building that it's at than to get a clear picture. This of course is a common yellow throat in its non-breeding plumage. I'd say a male with the brightness of that yellow there. But this is a sad, evocative, clear and identifiable picture. So is this. This is Hazel Kallenberg, again our mega volunteer. This is the same bird after they collected it, showing the human element, showing the concern there. This is not really the ideal picture. This happens all the time. Folks are not necessarily trained photographers and sometimes it can be dark in areas. But for a number of reasons this probably isn't going to move the advocacy needle for folks. This is a Lincoln's sparrow. I'll just talk about bird ID while we're here. You can tell the buff on the breast here, the clean white down here, and these little streaks down here indicate that this is a Lincoln's sparrow. One of the most beautiful sparrows we have. These are other clear and identifiable. These are sort of commonly seen type of pictures. This is a black pole warbler. This is among the trickier fall warblers that we get. You can tell by the yellow feet here that this is a black pole warbler. This is now a threatened species in Maine. Something to keep our eyes on. This again is another common yellow throat there. For identification, especially if you don't know the species or it's maybe not clear, to get a few shots so we can see different identification features. This shot here, the clear light, really tells me and especially this gray nape shows me this is a swamp sparrow here. Swamp sparrow is one of our most common bird. This is also a swamp sparrow but much harder to tell as you can see just because of the lighting. Anyway, take pictures please. That is the primary tool that we use and both to sort of get the word out and talk to potential officials but also to identify birds. We ask folks to send us pictures that you find when you're done for the day and then Chris and I go through and make the identification so we're sure. Yep. That's why multiple angles is helpful because they're different identifiers that we can use on different parts of the bird. The sides, the back, the breast, those are all good. Just moving the bird, turning it over to get those different angles is great. All right. What does it look like to walk around? It's fun. Believe it or not, it's fun. It's good exercise. You get to see the city before it wakes up and say you're out there when you can walk in the middle of the street. You can do it every once. It's fun. Here's what we do. In a minute here, I will send a Google spreadsheet around. I'll also email it around a little bit later that folks can use to sign up. You can do whatever you want. You can do one day a season. Most people do one day a week for the season, which ends up in the spring being six mornings. You pick a morning and you'll see that there are slots for up to four volunteers. You can communicate with those volunteers about how you're going to do it. Generally, what we ask is folks to start at the Ocean Gateway building down off 10th Street. There's plenty of parking there in the mornings and you walk that route in a counterclockwise fashion. If you have four volunteers though, or if you have any really, any more than one volunteer, you can, as long as one person is walking the typical route, you can do other things. We know that we miss birds because you've walked by the building already or you didn't get there in time and it'll beat you to it. You could have, say, someone start up on Congress Street and you do sort of a double loop or you can walk in opposite directions and see what happens. But generally, if it's just one person or you want to walk with two people, just do the regular route. You just walk. You just walk. You walk and you look at the ground. You'll know when you find a bird, but there also can be hidden in bushes and shrubberies and things out of the way. When you find a bird, you have a couple options. If it's a dead bird, you start by taking photos and then make a record of the time you found it, the address you're at, species if you'd like to, and just get those photos. If you find a stunned bird, it's up to you how you want to react. There are different levels of injury for these birds. Some birds are very mobile and will, will flit away from you and try to escape. If that's happening, just let the bird go on its way. If the bird, often we find birds clearly stunned and very injured, like this bird here, this, this white-throated sparrow is alive. But this, that foot posture there with the, with the, the digit extended and the sort of closed eyes, this bird is in very rough shape. You have a couple options. You could call Avian Haven and Diane can come and take the bird and try to rehabilitate it. The truth of the matter is that it's pretty unlikely that a bird in this state will be rehabilitated. There's often internal injuries from these strikes and it's, it sometimes can be seen as a lot of effort into a bird that may not survive, but that's up to you folks. Another option is to simply, to gingerly pick up the bird and move it to an area that seems safer. Birds like this in the sidewalk are at risk of being stepped on, certainly eaten. And so moving it to the cover of a bush or anywhere that feels sort of safer and more out of the way to let the bird recover if possible, is a good, is a good bet. So that's what we ask. For dead birds, we don't ask that you collect them or bring them with you. We generally move them away underneath a bush or in any place that you want that is off the sidewalk. We have in previous years worked with USM students who collected birds and do studies on them, but we simply don't have the sort of capacity to do that at this point unless Chris says different. So no need to sort of bring the birds with you unless you want to start your own collection for whatever reason. And I won't ask any further questions about that. That's how we do it. When you're done, get some coffee and breakfast. Number one is that you can justify the expense because you are a good person. You've done a good thing and you're helping birds. And then at some point during the day, email photos and the info to me, Chris. And we'll take it from there. Okay. The group walk is Thursday. Thank you, Amy. Thursday, April 18th at 5.30 a.m. I will not be there because I'll be on vacation. Sorry, not sorry, but Chris will be there. It's fun to walk around together. You get to meet some of the other other volunteers. And I will right now send the spreadsheet around that folks, if you're interested in signing up, can take a look and pick some days. And just kind of, I know this is a small group, but just for people, while Nick's getting that ready. So there's multiple columns in that spreadsheet. And the first column is we kind of have that person designated as our team leader, our group leader for that day. So that person is kind of in charge of contacting other people, making sure who's going to be there and what time you're going to meet and all that kind of stuff. Because the sun does, as you know, changes what it comes up. And so our start time often will shift as the days get longer. And we have to kind of race the birds out there. So yes, good. And there's, you could see, there's our group leader. And so their job is to, like I said, make contact with everybody else. And there is a tab on there. So if you go down here, you see my thing going down, boom, volunteer contact information, all of it is in here. Send a text. I don't know what this is doing. I'm going to go ahead and delete that. So put your information in. And then when you can see who's walking with you, like I'll reach out to Marsha and I know it's coming with me on April 30th. And we will just be like, hey, you're good. You're still coming tomorrow. That's great. We'll be here. If there's a bunch of people we can talk about whether we want to start at different areas or just meet up. Because it can be kind of a pain if you're there waiting and you don't know if the person's coming, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. And sometimes it's kind of iffy with weather. I mean, we do not walk this route when it's pouring down rain just because we're not expecting birds out there. However, if it's sort of misty foggy or there's a threat of rain, sometimes it's just nice to sort of check in with everybody else on the team to see, oh, should we go? Should we not go? And I said there are some pretty dedicated volunteers who will walk even when we have showery weather. So that's why it's just also nice to be able to check in with everybody else that's on that day. It's signed up for that day. I send weekly updates to all the walkers to update on progress. Another thing is to keep track of birdcast, the migration forecasting tool from Cornell, which really does a good job of giving us an indication of what we might find out there. So that is our spring 2024 presentation. I saw some names in there already and I'm very excited and grateful to you for doing that. Thank you. Are there any questions? If so, put them in the chat or the questions box and we'll do them now. And if there are not, I leave you with my gratitude and Chris, any parting words? Nope. Thank you, everybody, for your interest and for joining us on a Tuesday evening. And we hope to see some of you on our group walk. Oh, we got a queue in it. It gets somebody up there. Last month. There we go. Yeah. Hope to see some of you on the group walk and we can teach you the route. Sure. If a day has four volunteers who want to go anyway, is that okay? Absolutely. Go do whatever you'd like. Be in touch with the folks and they can say, they can tell you, you can play in or figure out or all go together. It can be a fun social time as well. I see Layla, sorry about if I'm mispronouncing that. How do we get to the spreadsheet? Do you see the link up above? Let me put it again. Here, put that back in there. That is the link to the spreadsheet. So click on that and we'll bring you over and you can look at the days and see who else is walking then and find the day that works for you. All right. Thank you, everyone. We'll be back in touch. I appreciate your time and your concern for birds and your willingness to do a good thing. Have a great night and we'll talk to you soon.