ONE OF NEW YORK CITY’S LITTLE-known and mostly unseen wonders is that, in the dark of night during spring and fall, millions of birds fly directly over Manhattan on a migration path that their ancestors have been traveling for millennia. For some, the journey stops short here: Astonishingly, the city sees nearly 250,000 bird deaths from collisions with glass every year.
As a bird enthusiast, I knew that the city’s position on the Atlantic Flyway makes it a risky place—that the built environment and a preponderance of glass create a dystopian house of mirrors for migrants drawn in and disoriented by electric lights. But I didn’t grasp the problem’s scale until, in 2020, I stumbled across a photo on social media of 26 birds that struck one building in a single morning. In an instant, the abstract idea of window collisions became concrete. I couldn’t remain a passive witness.
That fall, I began volunteering to log collisions with New York City Audubon’s Project Safe Flight. Started in 1997, the community science initiative puts boots on the ground during migration season to record birds injured or killed by window strikes. As with similar efforts around the country, trained volunteers walk prescribed routes at deadly hotspots citywide to collect comprehensive data about the victims they encounter. NYC Audubon uses the information to support advocacy, legislation, and research.
When I first started leaving my house before dawn to comb the sidewalks around a cluster of buildings in downtown Manhattan, I was optimistically naive. I
