The Bird-Friendly City: Creating Safe Urban Habitats

By Timothy Beatley

How does a bird experience a city? A backyard? A park? As the world has become more urban, noisier from increased traffic, and brighter from streetlights and office buildings, it has also become more dangerous for countless species of birds. Warblers become disoriented by nighttime lights and collide with buildings. Ground-feeding sparrows fall prey to feral cats. Hawks and other birds-of-prey are sickened by rat poison. These name just a few of the myriad hazards. How do our cities need to change in order to reduce the threats, often created unintentionally, that have resulted in nearly three billion birds lost in North America alone since the 1970s?
 
In The Bird-Friendly City, Timothy Beatley, a longtime advocate for intertwining the built and natural environments, takes readers on a global tour of cities that are reinventing the status quo with birds in mind. Efforts span a fascinating breadth of approaches: public education, urban planning and design, habitat restoration, architecture, art, civil disobedience, and more. Beatley shares empowering examples, including: advocates for “catios,” enclosed outdoor spaces that allow cats to enjoy backyards without being able to catch birds; a public relations campaign for vultures; and innovations in building design that balance aesthetics with preventing bird strikes. Through these changes and the others Beatley describes, it is possible to make our urban environments more welcoming to many bird species.
 
Readers will come away motivated to implement and advocate for bird-friendly changes, with inspiring examples to draw from. Whether birds are migrating and need a temporary shelter or are taking up permanent residence in a backyard, when the environment is safer for birds, humans are happier as well.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Island Press
• Release date: Nov 5, 2020
• ISBN: 9781642830484

Timothy Beatley

Timothy Beatley is the Teresa Heinz Professor of Sustainable Communities in the Department of Urban and Environmental Planning at the University of Virginia's School of Architecture and is the author of several books, including Ethical Land Use: Principles of Policy and Planning.

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https://www.BiophilicCities.org.

Chapter 1

The Benefits of Birds in a World Shaped by Humans

To listen to Curlews on a bright, clear April day, with the fullness of spring still in anticipation, is one of the best experiences that a lover of birds can have.

—Viscount Grey of Fallodon¹

Birds are remarkable because of the many benefits they bring to our world. From their roles as ecological linchpins in ecosystems around the world to the joy felt by a solitary person watching them hop on the ground near a park bench, there are myriad reasons to work hard to ensure a safe environment for birds. Fascinating studies reveal the contributions birds make to our emotional well-being, their ability to boost economies at both local and global scales, and their ecological importance. There are also compelling ethical arguments for preventing hazards to birds because of their inherent worth as living creatures.

Birds and Human Emotions

Our attraction to birds runs deep. The pleasure and joy we feel when they are around are undeniable, and for many of us their presence is a key aspect of our innate affiliation with and love of nature and of living systems. This connection is called biophilia, a love of life and living things. There are many who speak of the power of birds and the importance they play in their lives.

We want and need birdsong in urban areas. Cities are more enjoyable and more livable, and we lead more meaningful lives, when we hear them around us. We see it in the earnest song playing of a Northern Mockingbird, the family antics of Cardinals, the curiosity of an American Crow. I have often believed that the hours spent by Turkey Vultures thermaling in the air—yes, looking and smelling for the next meal—could also be explained in another way: that they are engaged in a joyful activity, biological but also deeply enjoyable to them. And it is certainly something joyful for earthbound humans to watch.

Viscount Grey of Fallodon’s 1927 book The Charm of Birds is an eloquent treatise on the many reasons we are drawn to birds. There is an entire chapter titled Joy Flights and Joy Sounds.² The sight and sounds of Curlews in spring, to him, suggested peace, rest, healing, joy, an assurance of happiness past, present and to come.³

There is sheer joy and joyfulness in seeing the flights and hearing the sounds of birds, and, just as important, they seem to be engaged in feeling joy as well. The main purpose served by flight is utilitarian, Grey said, to enable birds to reach feeding-places, to escape from enemies, to change their climate; but they also use flight to express blissful well-being; by this as well as by song they are gifted beyond all other creatures to convey to the mind of man the existence in Nature of happiness and joy.⁴

Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring, wrote eloquently about the importance of awe and wonder in our lives and of the need to impart this especially to our children as they grow up. From an early age, she wandered the hills of her childhood home in Pennsylvania in search of the wonder of birds and other animals, a love she carried throughout her life. In an early (1956) essay published in the Woman’s Home Companion, she wrote:

If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children, I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.⁵

Figure 1–1 Few birds are as wondrous and surprising as Hummingbirds. Here, a Ruby-throated visits a feeder at the author’s home. Photo credit: Tim Beatley

In a recent visit to the Cool Spring Nature Preserve, a thirty-two-acre preserve and birding center in West Virginia owned by the Potomac Valley Audubon Society, I spoke with avid birder Nancy Kirschbaum, who told me she has been birding since the age of twelve. I was a kid who loved animals. You can’t see lions in your backyard, but you can see birds in your backyard, she told me. The rest is history and a lifetime of birding.

In discussing the more recently developed technology that lets us dissect the nuances of birdsong, British sound expert Julian Treasure said, Over hundreds of thousands of years we’ve found that when the birds are singing things are safe. It’s when they stop you need to be worried.⁶

For the experienced listener there are many unique sounds to hear: the drumming of Woodpeckers and Snipes, the yodeling of Redshanks, the churring of Nightjars.

For me, birdsong has delivered doses of hope and optimism and pleasure. Some of my earliest memories involve birds and listening to their songs and calls. My favorite is the flute-like melody of the Eastern Wood Thrush, a song I look forward to hearing every spring and that immediately takes me back to my childhood in Virginia.

A recent essay in the New York Times by a doctor specializing in palliative care makes the point well. Dr. Rachel Clarke, with the United Kingdom’s National Health Service, wrote of her experience with patients in hospice care, at the end of their lives, and the intense solace some patients find in the natural world. She related the words and thoughts of one patient, Diane Finch, who had terminal breast cancer and was grappling with how to preserve herself in the face of death:

Somehow, when I listened to the song of a blackbird in the garden, I found it incredibly calming. It seemed to allay that fear that everything was going to disappear, to be lost forever, because I thought, Well, there will be other blackbirds. Their songs will be pretty similar and it will all be fine. And in the same way, there were other people before me with my diagnosis. Other people will have died in the same way I will die. And it’s natural. It’s a natural progression. Cancer is a part of nature too, and that is something I have to accept, and learn to live and die with.⁷

Clarke related the experience of another patient who wanted to keep the windows open and to keep on feeling the breeze on my face and listening to that blackbird outside.

Clarke ended her essay by noting the immediacy of nature and the value that it has to patients nearing the end of life. What dominates my work is not proximity to death but the best bits of living. Nowness is everywhere. Nature provides it.

And birds deliver a powerful dose of the nowness of life. Their energy, animation, and constant purposeful movement embody life itself and vitality itself.

I think it is difficult to overstate the poetic pleasure and joy of seeing or hearing a bird in the course of an otherwise routine day. That we are drawn to the beauty of birds has been demonstrated recently by the way an errant Mandarin Duck has fascinated the entire city of New York, it seems. Residents and tourists (and lots of media) clamor to Central Park to see him. The remarkable beauty of this creature is undeniable, even if his origin remains unclear.⁸ More recently, the arrival of a European Robin in Beijing, China, was met with similar throngs of birders and casual watchers.⁹

There is a beckoning otherness that birds exude—an invitation to take a moment to look around, to enjoy a daring movement or a melodious song, to slow down and to be deeply mindful of time and