Birds Beware?

Susan Elbin, an ornithologist at the Audubon Society states, "The estimate is that there [are] a billion birds killed across the United States every year by collisions into buildings" (qtd. inCityDark).

That is... that's.. that's uh.. that's a staggering statistic ya got there. It's almost hard to believe...

But holy crap, one billion? As in 1,000,000,000 birds. Per year. From smashing into windows alone. That's mind boggling... And that's pretty devastating too to think of how big of a portion of the bird population that is.

So why exactly are they flying into the windows of buildings? Well, besides the points that The City Dark pointed out about the night sky and city lights and stuff, here's some more reason as to why this is happening:  

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-03/18/bird-collisions-research

 "When in flight, birds may turn their heads to look down, either with the binocular field or with the lateral part of an eye's visual field. This results in certain species being at least temporarily blind in the direction of travel.

As they're not always looking straight ahead, it's hardly surprising that birds collide into man-made structures, regardless of their size.  Furthermore, as Martin is exploring, avian frontal vision is suited for the detection of movement rather than special detail. This means birds are great at hunting smaller animals running along the ground, but less able to see static, if large, objects and more likely to be looking out for moving objects when flying."


 Interesting. So birds rarely look forward and see where they're actually flying... Thus explains the tendency for them to fly into man-made objects.



There are all these efforts and strategies being put into practice to help reduce this number, and many of them work great.

But my question is, what about adaptation?

 In addition to English this semester, I'm taking biology, and in biology, one of the characteristics that defines all living organisms is the ability for all organisms to adapt to environmental changes.

So if according to biology, and all living things share the basic property to adapt, then won't birds eventually evolve to be aware of potential threats in the air while they're flying? It might take some time for this to be put into effect, but after maybe 3-4 generations, birds should be able respond to this problem themselves. However, after a quick google search, the average lifespan of a bird is around 6-10 years (with a common pigeon being around 2-3). So this adaptation may potentially take up to 20-40 years to take effect.

But until then, I'd say we're doing alright in terms of helping birds out.