 Hi everybody. Sorry, this is Nick Lund from an Audubon of BirdSafe Maine. I forgot to hit record at the beginning. We're kind of jumping into the middle. Bird strikes are a big problem. We'll get to the volunteer piece in a minute. This is my, this is Professor Marr from, or Mayor Marr, I'm sorry, I was going to say Mayor, I always do that incorrectly. Professor Mayor from USM, a founding partner in BirdSafe Maine, and she's going through what we find in the spring in the city of Portland. Okay, cool. And right, so that's showing you just like I said, sort of a timing of the, of the finds. But this is actually how many birds we're finding across the seasons, and there's a few things going on in these slides. So this depicts our, our five seasons where we have found birds and the first thing that might stand out to you is that fall is pretty busy. And we definitely find a lot more birds in the fall that we do in the spring and that probably has to do with a few factors, not least of which is the fact that there are probably just more birds as you if you saw Nick's initial slide just showing you the number of birds that are migrating south is a lot more than migrating north and that's because you have all those babies that are hatched in the spring over the course of the season that are now moving southward and not all of them make it to go back north in the, in the next year. So we do find more. But you can see that we have been finding birds in the spring in the fall and we've also see that we are increasing the number of birds that we are finding even though our effort hasn't actually increased, especially between fall 21 and fall 22 but there's some other reasons that I can go into as to probably why we are seeing such a big increase and this is also one of the reasons why we are excited and a little anxious perhaps about what we're going to find this spring pattern that we saw from fall 2022. And not the crux of the matter is that there's a building in particular that has really come online now that we have access to. There's another there's a couple of buildings that are close to the waterfront that are are open and we can get to because they've newly constructed and we think that that's sort of driving this increase. What you also see is that the majority of the birds that we find are dead. We do find a little over half of the birds that we find are not alive, but then we do find about maybe 40% of the birds are stunned. So they have hit the window. And they're often just sitting there motionless you can, you can tell that the bird is stunned and not quite with it and what we can do is, as Nick slide showed before you can call avian haven and we can have some rehabilitators take care of them. So what we do is we just move the bird to a safe place under some cover of bushes. It may make me cover it may not. It depends on the extent of its injuries a lot of times you just can't tell because they're internal injuries and are pretty traumatic. The other category of birds that we find though to our strikes and this is when and this is just being in the right place at the right time, a bird just hits the window and then pretty much just bounces off. And, and those can be hard to identify because the birds hit real quickly and then fly away so they're a challenge but we do see a fair number of birds that just strike as well. Alright, so that's sort of some of the overall patterns. Nick alluded to the birds that we find, we find birds from many different families, not all of them are songbirds but the vast majority of these birds that strike our songbirds. And you can see in particular that the, the most vulnerable birds are the New World Sparrows and the warblers. And again that's not surprising because of the birds that migrate through Portland. During the fall and the spring and Nick, feel free to jump in with your bird expert hat on here too for for talking about any of that too. These thrushes are another big one. We find quite a few hermit thrushes. We found Swainsons, some other thrushes in there too, as well as. Yeah, those are some of the predominant birds. Yeah, it's partly because you know we have 20 or so different warblers that come through Maine, and, you know, to 10 or so different sparrows species so there it's sort of a stack deck a little bit. Often it's sparrows and warblers but but we found everything from large woodpeckers to wood cocks to all kinds of other things. Yes, thank you. All right so that's if we let's go in we can dive down a little bit deeper and look at these two families in particular of the warblers that we find. The warblers are by far the most common, no pun intended, and oven birds are kind of a distant second but those are particularly vulnerable and if you're that's not too surprising given the habits of common yellow threads they like to be down low, kind of thrushes and things like that and so when, then they take off, they'll are more prone to running into the glass buildings when they, if they're trying to just look for food or avoid a predator or something like that. So common yellow threads by far the most abundant and then amongst the sparrows, it's the white-roded sparrows. Again, sparrows in general tend to like to be down on the ground, hopping around looking for food and are particularly vulnerable to glass strikes so we find a lot of white-roded sparrows. They're I think the most common bird overall that we find and again swamp sparrows distant second and then we have these unknowns to see a lot of those are strikes because they hit they bounce and then they fly away and sparrows can be difficult enough to identify, especially when they're in flight so so that's one thing that we found there and then in terms of location so this is another big important piece of the data that we collect, not just what species we're finding but where we find them. And so these are some we found birds at something like 67 different locations along our route and Nick's going to show you what that route is in a few minutes. Again, fall accounts for the bulk of these but but we do find them significant number in the spring and actually if you boil it down there are six buildings in Portland that are responsible for about two thirds of all of the collisions that we find along our survey route. And these are the addresses and Nick I don't know do I have time to kind of narrow down and show them our top three. Okay, if you want to sure. Okay, so so our top three bird buildings that where we find these birds so we'll start with number three in third place is this building on 10th Street it doesn't actually have an address yet, but it's a brand new building. It's across from the narrow gauge railroad you may be familiar with it. And this is the one that came online, really in the fall of 2022 and we are finding a considerable number of birds there and for some of the reasons that Nick alluded to before. It's, it's close to the water so birds, if they're following the shoreline along their migration path if they're using that as a route things like that then, and then they drop down and they rest and they drop down into this lovely habitat that's right adjacent to the building. If they're flying over at night and then they're going to rest during the day and so there's good habitat and then there's a lot of glass right nearby to so those three factors are probably contributing to why we find so many birds there. In this place, we have this building which is located on commercial street but it sits back from commercial street a little ways by separated by a parking lot, but it has some of the same attributes, there's really nice habitat some of the largest trees I think in the old buildings are sitting right here. And there's an alleyway that separates a parking garage from this building where those trees are and so birds can come in there that and see that great habitat and then when they take off. They just hit the windows because there's a lot of glass and those windows as you can see here reflect the habitat right around there. So about one in five birds that we find strike here. And then the biggest culprit where we find a quarter of the birds are at this building, which is right in the corner of Hancock Street and 10th Street across from the ocean terminal. Again, right against the water. There's a lovely courtyard in the back that traps birds again because of the shape of that. There's nice habitat adjacent to it and just like I said, a fair amount of glass so those are sort of the places that we have found the most to date. And it'll be interesting to see how things shape up again this year, and I'll stop sharing in part because we do have some new buildings that are in that same general area that will be monitoring for sure this year. So, okay. Thanks Chris. That was awesome. And I will say before folks ask we are in contact with the owners of all those buildings, and they are aware of the problem. The trouble is, it's, it can be very difficult to retrofit a building. It can be extremely expensive, it can be technically difficult to get up and treat areas. And there's no requirement right now for anybody to do anything. And so even well meaning business owners, even if they wanted to, you know, take action, it can be very expensive and hard and so we're not trying to sort of shame building owners, especially ones that are already existing. We are working with them and are happy to help them take action where they can. But we are trying to, this is a scientific effort to try to learn about this, especially to get ordinance pass that will take care of this in the future so we don't have new giant glass buildings coming down. But we are working with those buildings and others on potential treatments. Okay, so I'm going to jump in now. And let me say to that folks have questions you can put them in down in the q amp a box at the bottom and we will get to them at the end. But we're going to try to power through some of the stuff about what it takes to be a volunteer here. And I forgot how to share my screen do that again here we are you see that again. Here's the wrap. And what we are trying to do is walk a diverse route through the city. So when we started this work it was really about, hey, does the science that we've learned in other parts of the country. Does it also apply to Portland, which means two things are birds hitting in Portland, and are they hitting more often against buildings with more glass than than non buildings. So we designed this route to take us by both it takes us by buildings that have a lot of glass, but also some of the more, you know older or different buildings in Portland that don't have as much class you think about the old port, think about a lot of sort of smaller windows a lot of brick. Those are buildings are not particularly, you know, jump out as being dangerous to birds, but we wanted to see if that poor more out in practice. And after two and a half years, we can say unequivocally that yes, birds are striking against the city of Portland, and they are striking against buildings that have more glass more often they are with other So this is the route is slightly modified from, you know, we sort of tinker with it a little bit each season but it's basically been the same throughout. We start down here. Can you see my cursor Chris. Okay, start down here at Ocean Gateway. It's just kind of a nice place to park. There's plenty places to park down here, and we do find birds against the entrance to the ferry terminal there. We start there and we go across the street to the wax building. This is the building that Chris identified as being the one that has seen the most strikes in the city so far. We typically start there we walk down the street. This is part of the new development. This is that number three most dangerous building the sunlight building down here. Up we go down four street we walk up middle street go all the way down here to the TD Bank building up to one city center up to this workout anytime building which has seen a lot of strikes before there's a 24 hour gym with a lot of glass. Walk down to the cross insurance arena walk back down to commercial street up for some buildings here on four street and then back. That's the route. It takes about it's a couple it's about two miles. It takes about an hour that right Chris. So it's been a while so yeah it just depends on how many birds we find but yeah you can usually do it in about an hour. So all so the way it works is that you ideally you meet up with a buddy or another volunteer in the morning, and then you walk the route looking for birds. If you find some you may not find some when you're done when you find one you have a couple options you can you take a picture pictures are very important to this process and I'll actually go into the pictures a little bit more. We use the pictures as our advocacy pictures of birds on the street. It's very sad but it's but it's very helpful. We're talking with business owners talking with folks to say look at this, look at the face of this problem it's undeniable there that birth strikes can be an easy problem to overlook, unless you're sort of confronted with it. So we asked folks to take pictures of birds, and then if the bird is dead, you can the best thing to do is just move it to an out of the way place. In the past we've worked with usm students who've collected birds for for study. We don't have that right now, and we don't need the carcasses of the birds. It's probably best to let nature take its current course with with insects and things and just move the bird out of the way if you feel okay doing that. You can collect them if you'd like, but but that's not required. So for injured birds gets a little trickier. As Chris said, there, there is very little that rehabilitate rehabilitators can do to help birds that have that have struck. These are small birds with internal injuries, typically, and that's just a difficult thing to fix. However, we do have a partnership with avian haven and you are welcome to collect a bird if you want and call avian haven to see if there's something they can do. Otherwise, what we often do is if you are able to, to catch the bird and often you can. You can just place it out of the way, you know, a lot of times birds are sitting right on the sidewalk, where they are, you know, susceptible to gold predation or to getting stepped on by commuters. You can just move the bird to a place where it can recover a bush or a tree or somewhere out of the way. That's giving it the best chance that we can give it. And we'll see what happens there. But here's the route. This is how that works. And let me see actually I'll come back to those. Well, let's we'll do the photo so. Oh, real quick. So Mark asked if the buildings are color coded on the map. So the buildings here are color coded to these to be numbered but our intern are our GB cog fellow Katie did this sort of rainbow thing now and so yes purple is Ocean Gateway, and then it goes around the chromatic scale from there all the way back to purple. So we have greater Portland Council of Governments through AmeriCorps has given us a fellow this year, a wonderful young woman named Katie, who is actually up presenting on this work somewhere in the mid coast to AmeriCorps crew right now so she can't but she put together this really helpful route map, and I will have these. I will email this around to folks for a map, but I also will have them during the group walk on the 18th. I'll talk about the group walk a little bit more in detail in a second but every kickoff day for this work we all get together and we get everybody to walk the route together. It's really helpful to sort of figuring out what the route is to talk about where to look. And so I'll do it again at the end but I want to encourage everyone to join us on April 18 at six in the morning. I'm going to get that out there right now. This is early work, six in the morning at Ocean Gateway and we'll all walk together and it's a lot of fun and really educational. And that's a late start. But I won't scare everybody away. Katie also put together these great photo slides and this is something that is really helpful because getting getting good photos is really helpful to our advocacy effort. So Katie put together these slides clear identifiable and evocative is the is what we're looking for. Photos like this are not super identifiable. I can't tell what bird species that is I'm going to guess white-throated sparrow. But that's helpful to see the glass that it's struck by but not super helpful to help us understand what type of bird is a photo like this. You know what shows you that this is a living creature was a living creature this common yellow throat. It is a very evocative and clear and identifiable photo. So this is the Collin Bergs again with a common yellow throat sewing the building and evocative photo blurry photos or difficult lighting this can be hard are not as helpful. This is a Lincoln sparrow I can tell but you know, because of the lighting conditions here this isn't a photo that we'd be sort of be able to use in an advocacy context. So others are here are some clear photos of in this case a black hole warbler and another common yellow throat. And again to swamp sparrows showing you some sort of good and bad photos. So if you feel comfortable, you know channel your inner advocate channel your inner photo journalist, get right down on the ground. Take a clear photo it really helps a lot with the back end. And so how does it work. So this is how you walk around. You start, especially early on it's at six in the morning. So the biggest challenge for everyone in this work, myself included is getting up in the morning and getting out there. I will say, once you are once you are out there and especially once you're done it's seven in the morning you've walked a couple of miles you feel great about yourself. You've seen the city in a different way. You get some coffee and you don't have to worry about eating that croissant because you've just been walking around. So it does feel great for the rest of the day once you do it, getting up is is is never any fun, but some people love it and I encourage you to do it. You. So typically you start at Ocean Gateway. This is down there along commercial street. This is where we'll meet for the first time I will say you don't need to start there. So when you have at least two volunteers every morning. Sometimes we have more many mornings we have more. And when you have more you could choose to walk start a different part of the route. We encourage volunteers to communicate with each other to see where everybody is starting. The truth is something we've learned in the years of doing this is that birds sometimes don't last very long on the sidewall. Birds are gobbled especially by gulls that come down and get a meal, but they're also rodents and other things that eat birds. And so, and that's one of the reasons why we start so freaking early is because we have to beat the gulls to the birds. Correct. So, but we found that if you so it can be you know if you're starting at Ocean Gateway, it may be an hour or so before you get to some places on commercial street. But if you start at different places and then you can stagger around and have a better chance of connecting with bears on the sidewall. But we started traditionally at Ocean Gateway. Bring the clothes you need. I will have some Ziploc bags and paper bags to distribute if you want them. Otherwise it's basically just standard walking and make sure to have your camera. When you find a dead bird or a live bird take photos and then take note of the time, the building you are at the address, the species if possible, and any other notes you may have. And at the end of the day, you're going to send those to me. And that's what it looks like when you're done when you're done. Congrats just let yourself for being a good person this is real. This is real good work. I mean this this work is directly contributing to policy changes in city in Portland and around the state. And so you are helping so thank you so much for for doing get some pastries and get some coffee. It's that's the best part, and then email the photos and the info to Chris and I. And then we make sure the bird is identified correctly, and we slot them into our database that we can use for advocacy later on. All right, and then finally we're going to begin on the 18th. 6am at Ocean Gateway. I will share these two things as well. This is how it's going to work here. This is an electronic waiver for folks to sign out. This is just something that may not have to do for our volunteers. And we also have this sign up sheet. So this is how this looks. Some of our, our core team here is already signed up for days but you see I will share this around everybody. You can pick the days that work for you. You can do as many days as you want or as few days as you want, a totally up to you. If people choose one morning a week. That's great if you can do that if you can't do that that's totally fine too. But you'll see there's spots for four different volunteers here. Hopefully we'll add them out. You can go with the group or you can choose a different way to go. And then what we asked folks to do is put their contact information into this other tab down here. That way different volunteers can connect with each other as they're going out to see, you know, are you sick are you showing up or where are you going to start things That's it. Yeah, we generally asked that at least one person for that given day make contact with the other people just to coordinate and and yeah so everybody's on the same page. All right. Okay. So, Chris, any other things to add before I jump into questions. I will say we do as the sunrise gets earlier we do start earlier as the as this spring goes on and it gets a little rough. And as spring goes on and you have to get up a little bit earlier, maybe like each week, the time changes a little bit more. And again, that's where it's good to sort of coordinate with other members of the of the team that day, so that everybody agrees what time we're going to start. Thank you. I'm sorry I'm looking at the chat to and there's a, there's one question that I'll let you take but yeah Diane Davidson is still contact for wounded birds Marsha yes. And yeah if there's four volunteers usually what we do is we will do it to and to so we pair up to people will walk in one direction to people will walk in another direction. I guess that a pair may start at a different location along the route to and so we'll we talk about if we're going to walk clockwise or counterclockwise. Yeah, and pairing up is important. You know, we have never had any kind of problems on the streets, but anything is possible on the streets, walking in pairs, really does help that. We encourage folks to do only what they feel comfortable and safe doing. Again, we've never had any kind of issue with anybody on the streets but but this is out in public and an early in the morning so do what you feel comfortable with. And, and that's, and that's great. Let me answer a few more questions from the questions here. If you can't make it on the 18th can we still join later absolutely. I will send around the sign up sheet to all the interest volunteers everyone who signed up for this and pick a date and then just get in touch with the other volunteer doing I would encourage you to maybe sign up for a date. That you know other people are already doing or that I'm doing and that way you can, or Chris or any, any people that we connect with someone to make sure that you're going around so it doesn't have to be on the 18th. Steven's about Merlin sure Merlin is a very helpful bird identification tool that you could download on your phone, and you can just hold your phone out and it'll identify the bird for you. Merlin is awesome for birders of all kinds, whether you're doing this or just birding and so please download Merlin, I will say that we're not don't worry too much about getting the identification right. It's really hard when these birds are injured or, or, you know, it's dark out there. That's something that Chris and I do really well, and, and, and get a good photo, and then we can make sure that the identification is solid later. So, but Merlin really helps in the moment. Sylvia asked can you walk a half or two thirds of the route if you don't have time for the full route that's interesting. And walking the full route is preferred but any slice helps. And so what I would make sure you just connect with the other volunteers during those mornings and so you can let them know, you know what your abilities are but of course, anything that helps. We can also there's other options to like staying put at one building. You know we never know what we miss when we're not there. And, you know, staying at one particular building to see how many strikes occur there is a strategy you could do to if you're if you're living a long time. With all this info be in film will be emailed from Joel yes I will be emailing everything around, including links to the sign up sheet links to the route map, and, and, and things like that. If you have any other questions at any time please reach out to Chris and yeah Barry Barry makes a good point that the the shaming may help. Shaming buildings does help absolutely and you know it's a fine line between you know being standoffish and, you know, encouraging them to take action. We have seen it work and buildings do want to do the right thing, sometimes, sometimes not. And then, you know, we don't have regulatory tools at this point to force buildings to do anything. But we're working on it, but maintaining a good relationship and not an antagonistic relationship with with the design community is extremely important at this point as we're working to get agreement on an ordinance and get things through. So, yeah, so we're doing our best there. And somebody did ask about the ordinance, kind of the timeline for that for the with Portland. It is possible. So we have a draft ordinance now, we are working it together with the city of Portland. We think they're going to be supportive of it. We may be able to hold public events about the ordinance directly as soon as the end of this month. We haven't been put on the schedule yet but we are working on that we're fending on having two sessions one for the building and design community itself, and one for the public at large, then as soon as potentially may, we may be able to have a vote in front of the city council. We have city council support from the from the beginning here. So we'll see how it goes. When that comes I will be in emergency touch with everybody here and others to encourage you to come out and support this ordinance and honestly these images and the data that we collect gets us here, I mean it gets us in the door to say look it's what's what's what's happening on the street. So that's really important. Let me see here, send them out I will send them out. Have to drop off. That's it. Oh, somebody asked about another contact person at haven't silverman. I don't recognize that name. Anyone, anyone that even haven't can help or can connect you with someone who can help. You know they do incredible work over there and are willing to come down at different hours to get stuff. But sometimes they may be out sometimes they may be gone and so I generally encourage people to call any number even that they can, whether it's Diane's number, or the general number listed on their website Center for Wildlife is another one we work with they're based down in York County, and they can help. I see a lot of talking I just did any other questions. This is great. This is good work, and this is growing work and if you volunteer with us you know you are joining something I think you can be really proud of something that's that's making progress and so I thank you all for coming for your interest. If you have questions about what you can do at your homes, or what you can do at places that are not Portland feel free to reach out to. Put our addresses in the chat again. So you have them if you have more questions feel free to reach out to us. And Nick will be sending some more information. I will. I look forward to seeing you all on the 18th if possible. And if not seeing you wherever we can. And thanks everybody for your help. Thanks everybody for cutting for attending. Look forward to seeing you on the route. Take care. Bye.