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Utah's Foremost Platform for Undergraduate Research Presentation
2021 Abstracts

Analyzing Fatal Bird-Window Collision Mitigation Occurring at the Classroom and Student Services Building, Brigham City, UT.

Presenters: Hunter Martin, College of Science, Ecology
Authors: Hunter Martin, Jacob Larkin, Taylor Kenyon, Brooklyn Kotter, Cristian Soto, Karissa Sears
Faculty Advisor: Jessica Habashi, College of Science, Ecology
Institution: Utah State University

“Bird-window collisions are often not thought about as if they are a major problem to bird populations worldwide. This is not the case as bird populations are threatened by these collisions. In the United States alone it is estimated that 97.6 - 975.6 million birds fatally collide with human-made windows annually, and another 16 to 42 million collide in Canada per year. Our focus is to investigate a possible window collision problem and explore different mitigation efforts to prevent these collisions at the USU-Brigham City campus (Brigham City, Utah, 84302). We hope to determine how many fatal bird-window collisions are occurring on an annual basis. We are completing a daily census and already have data from previous years; however, those data cover only August to December, so our census will run for 12 months. Once enough information and data are collected, we plan to determine which types of mitigation efforts work best given the climate, location and behaviors of the local bird populations. We predict that large open windows with foliage nearby to be hotspots given previous data. These hotspots will be important locations to test out different mitigation efforts to be able to determine what works best to mitigate fatal bird window-collisions. When this is complete we plan to test the effects of our mitigation efforts by continuing the census. We also plan to educate the community on how to prevent these collisions at their own homes as more than 50 percent of collisions are on residential properties.”