Connected with nature: bird-friendly glass screen printing

Birds have always been able to move freely in nature. Modern sources of danger such as glass panes or other transparent or highly reflective elements did not exist. The birds cannot avoid these obstacles and often collide with the windshield without braking and at high speed.

Danger source glass

A source of danger results from the following two factors, among others:

Transparency

In flight, the bird focuses on an object behind the target and flies to it. The transparent pane is not perceived as an obstacle and the bird collides with it.

Reflection

The bird flies at an object or the reflecting open sky, which is reflected in the disc and also collides with the disc.

Markers checked in the flight channel

Since 2006, Martin Rössler has been conducting standardized flight tunnel experiments at the Hohenau-Ringelsdorf Biological Station (Austria). In terms of scope and methodology, these are considered to be the most reliable validated empirical test series for evaluating the benefits of markings on glass panes.

The WSM bird protection glass was derived from this. With 9% printed glass area and only 5.2% approaches, this mark combines the best features of all bird-friendly glass designs. 5.2% approaches mean that only 5.2% of the birds flew against the marked disk in the choice experiment, but 94.8% flew against the control disk. The individual black dots of the vertically arranged rows of dots each have a diameter of 8 mm. There is a distance of 100 mm between each row.

Source: Swiss Ornithological Institute Sempach(vogelwarte.ch)