New WFSU Window Murals Help Local Birds (we hope)

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You may have just walked up to the WFSU Public Media front door and wondered, “What’s with these cool nature murals?” You then might have clicked on the QR code we drew on one window, and here you are! If you want to know who drew these murals, and what plants and animals you’re seeing, we have answers. More importantly, I want to tell you why we embarked on this artistic collaboration.

When we started planning our No Mow March campaign, our friends at FSU Sustainable Campus thought I might like to meet students working on an another campus-related project. They were with the Spoonbill Society, a student Audubon chapter at Florida State University. A couple of years ago, they became concerned with the number of birds hitting windows on campus, and found funding to implement a solution.

Windows reflect the world around them. If you’ve ever visited the FSU main campus, you know that world is, essentially, a lush, well-manicured garden. Birds see trees, shrubs, wildflowers, and grasses – food and shelter – in FSU campus windows, and they fly at this reflected habitat. A 2014 study estimated that, in a given year, between 100 million and one billion birds die from striking windows.

For years, I had been hearing about the numerous birds striking our lobby window. This student project felt like something that could be more than a story I covered. It was a chance to put their solution into practice right here at our studio.

Florida State University and Innovation Park birding hotspots

For Kaya Simmons, this began as a group project in an ornithology class. Rather than something purely academic, they wanted to do something with a “real life conservation implication. And that ended up being looking at birds hitting windows on campus, because we know this is a phenomenon that happened all over the world, and we wanted to see if it was a problem that could be happening on campus. And it definitely was.”

Over the course of a week, they surveyed five buildings on FSU campus, and found 28 strikes.

Sometimes these strikes come in clusters, as flocks of birds are feeding. A few months ago, Kaya came to WFSU with Chris Watkins from Sustainable Campus to test the wax pencils we would use for the murals. As we stood and talked by the lobby window, cedar waxwings descended on the adjacent, berry-laden holly trees. When I returned later to film them, our CFO came out and told me that five of these migratory birds hit her window.

Florida State University’s main campus, and our home where in Innovation Park, are both home to a high diversity of birds.

Kaya applied for an Audubon Action grant to cover the cost of materials, and started seeking sites to cover. WFSU Public Media was the first to agree to it, and she hopes others see how it looks and follow suit.

A little extra motivation

After the artists drew their designs on the windows, over finals week, Kaya brought friends to fill empty spaces with dots. Jakob Major was standing on a ladder adding dots to a cypress wetland when he looked over and saw a cardinal hop onto an adjacent tree, and then into a clump of moss.

Jakob admitted that he would not likely have noticed the grey-feathered female in her nest of grey moss had she not hopped onto another branch first. Birds like cardinals, and the mourning dove nesting next to our back door, have adapted to live in close proximity with humans. Still, in those first moments when those baby cardinals leave the nest and test their wings, we all feel better knowing they won’t see the trees leading up the walk to front door, or those lining Pottsdamer Street, reflected in our front windows.

Treating Windows: Best Practices

Birds are hitting windows, here at WFSU and on campus. Likely, it’s an issue throughout Tallahassee. This is a city with an extensive urban canopy, surrounded by hundreds of thousands of acres of conservation land, and situated along high-traffic migration flyways. We have a lot of birds. And anywhere with a lot of glass is a danger to them.

To prevent bird strikes, we have to disrupt the reflected image in our windows and glass doors. Ideally, we can do this in a way that doesn’t block our view.

When Kaya and her friends started researching bird strikes, they found a few options. Some are more expensive, while others are affordable, but labor intensive. When we started this endeavor, she shared a few links to further reading, including a Bird Collisions handbook created by the National Park Service.

The handbook lists more options than I will share here. Here are a few of the most common solutions:

Decals

Weather proof decals can interrupt the reflectivity of a window. For them to be effective, decals must:

• Be placed on the outside of a window. When we played with placing designs behind the glass of our lobby, we noticed how hard it was to see through two panes of glass, the outside of which is coated in security film. It is a dark, thick window.
• Be placed two inches apart, at the most. Any further apart, and a bird will perceive an opening that it can fly through.

The design can be as simple as dots, or geometric patterns. This might be more attractive for certain businesses, and it was the option that I thought WFSU management might opt for. I never thought they’d go for my nature-scene mural idea, but I’m happy to be wrong about that.

People had once thought that decals of bird predators would frighten off birds, but it seems like this does not fool them.

Tape

The same rules apply to weather-proof tape, which can be used in combination with decals.

Paint or Wax Pencil (the one we picked)

When WFSU’s management team and FSU Facilities green lit our mural idea, Kaya reached out to her contacts at Florida Gulf Coast University. The FGCU Ornithology Club had created an installation on the windows of the student art gallery, and Kaya found out that they had used Sharpie wax pencils.

Kaya, Chris, and I made a few test markings, and then tried to wipe them off with water and windex. It took some hard scrubbing with windex to remove them. Our entrance is under a large overhang, so it’s well-protected from weather. Still, the drawings will fade over time, and will need to be touched up or replaced. Decals and window film would last longer.

The two-inch gap rule still applies with this option. As you’ll soon see, many of the mural designs had open spaces in the sky or water, or the wide buttress of a cypress tree. These, we would fill with dots or other markings.

We’ll learn more about our design process below.

External Motorized Shades or Bird-Crash Preventers

There are various options for installing a physical barrier on the outside of your window. These can be pricy, but they might be a more palatable aesthetic option for some people. The key with the motorized shades is to remember to close them.

Window Film

This is a preprinted film you can apply to the outside of a window. Some options use patterns of Ultraviolet absorbing and reflecting dots. This makes the design invisible to human eyes, but not to most birds. Yes, most, but not all, and so doves and raptors might still collide with the windows.

Designing WFSU’s Front Window Treatments

My favorite part of this project is how many departments at FSU collaborated. It started with biology students, who reached out to Sustainable Campus. Chris Watkins connected them with WFSU, and reached out to art and design professors. Meredith Lynn (Art Department) and Meghan Mick (Interior Architecture and Design) identified students for us.

This talented team then submitted designs:

• Kayley Dorn, Interior Design
• Anna La Sala, double major in Studio Art and History
• Elsa Marcet, Interior Design
• Stephen Snyder, Studio Art

Kaya brought a few friends to complete the design and make it fully functional as bird strike prevention:

• Kaya Simmons
• Olivia Schafer
• Gabby Brandon
• Jakob Major
• Towards the end of the last day, Kaya asked me if I wanted to fill in a panel, and I did.

I love watching a creative project come together. Some of the designs changed quite a bit from paper to glass, and others almost not at all.

Stephen’s design changed very little from what we see below.

I asked our artists to tackle different north Florida ecosystems. We see a couple of different longleaf pine habitats, a sandhill and mesic flatwoods. For aquatic environments, we visit a spring-fed river and a cypress wetland. Here is a rendering of the windows together. Below, we identify the plants and animals brought to life by these artists.

Panel 1: WFSU-FM Hallway, by Elsa Marcet

Panel 2: One animal from every artist

There is an office just off this main hallway, and it has a smaller window. We decided to have every artists add one animal.

Panel 3: by Elsa Marcet

Panels 4 & 5: WFSU front doors, by Kayley Dorn

Panels 6 & 7: by Stephen Snyder

Panel 8: By Kayley Dorn

Panel 9: by Anna La Sala

Panel 10: by Anna La Sala