In the years since buying crazy house I worked to curb the number of bird strikes, as with over 100 external panes of glass, strikes were a chronic issues. First I tried small and simple colored clings, but they only helped a bit. Then I used my Cricut and some RabbitGoo to make some bird silhouettes that I plastered across the problem windows.
But we still had the occasional fatality, especially during the spring and early summer when fledglings were out and about. I call them the bonks– that tell-tale sound of another bird colliding with our windows. So last summer I got very serious: I ordered several hundred feet of the CollidEscape Tape and with the help of ladders, our man-lift, and an assistant, it was put up across all the problem windows. That meant the north facing windows of my office, the south and west facing windows of the great room and the sliding doors over at the studio building.
And now…a full year later I can happily report the number of bonks of any sort has dramatically decreased. We have had a few stuns and a handful of deaths but not on the glass we have treated with the tape. The strikes we have had were one-offs: nothing before had hit the particular glass and nothing since has hit there, so I’m still evaluating if I should install tape on those spots.
An added bonus? The success even spawned an article for the newsletter of The Los Gatos Birdwatcher — a bird feeding/watching store down in Los Gatos!
beautiful. Still dyin’ to visit.