COURIER L 12 IFE, MARCH 19-25, 2021
Protecting our
feathered friends
Bird club fundraising to ‘bird-proof’ bay
Dennis Hrehowsik (left), president of the Brooklyn Bird Club in front of the “bird-proofed”
Salt Marsh Nature Center. Photo by Dennis Hrehowsik
BY JESSICA PARKS
Brooklyn bird enthusiasts are raising
funds to prevent avian collisions in
Jamaica Bay — aiming to install birdsafe
fi lm on the windows at a local wildlife
refuge, which they hope will inspire
others to consider “bird-proofi ng.”
“One of the things we would love to
do is to try to convince people to treat
their windows to try to make them birdsafe
and collision-safe,” said Dennis
Hrehowsik, president of the centuryold
Brooklyn Bird Club. “We thought a
great place to start would be the buildings
in Jamaica Bay and within the
National Parks Services system that
both have a lot of bird traffi c.”
While the City Council passed regulations
in December 2019 requiring new
or altered buildings to use glazed or patterned
glass to cut down on bird deaths
and window strikes, there are no such
requirements for existing structures.
The Brooklyn Bird Club has been
working to bird-proof borough buildings
for over a year, the club’s president
said, and has already raised $10,000,
which funded bird-safe fi lm for the
Salt Marsh Nature Center in Marine
Park that was installed in October, and
kick-started its latest endeavor — outfi
tting the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge
Center. “We were able to get most
of the way there,” Hrehowsik said.
The birders are now seeking an additional
$5,000 to bird-proof the refuge
center in neighboring Queens
this April — and have received nearly
$1,500 in donations just one day since
launching their online fundraiser.
“We could have gotten the part of
the Jamaica Bay wildlife center that
was most problematic with the $10,000
but we thought, since we are going to be
in there, let’s get the whole thing done,”
Hrehowsik said. “Let’s raise a little bit
of capital and do it the right way.”
Bird-proofi ng requires pasting a
fi lm over the clear glass window that
contains an image or pattern that
breaks up the refl ection of the environment
around it to signal that a bird
should change course, Hrehowsik said.
“Basically, a refl ecting window
looks like sky to a bird so it thinks it
can keep going,” he said. “And these
patterns sort of break up that clean
line that the bird thinks it has in the
window so it realizes it has to turn.”
The fi lm can also be visually-appealing,
Hrehowsik added, pointing to
the work done at the visitor’s center at
the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.
“Having seen some of these fi lms, they
are quite attractive actually and are really
cool,” Hrehowsik said. “It can actually add
something aesthetically to your building
to take part in one of these projects.”
The windows of the Salt Marsh Nature
Center in Marine Park are now
outfi tted with a dotted pattern, which
is one of the more common designs
used to prevent bird collisions.
New York City is a major thoroughfare
for birds migrating north and
south, and clear-glass windows lead to
hundreds of thousands of avian deaths
per year, the bird club president said.
“What people don’t realize is they
think of New York City as this manmade
megatropolis, and it is,” Hrehowsik
told Brooklyn Paper, “but it
has always been a crossroads. Before it
was a trading point, it was always the
Atlantic Flyway where birds the last
40,000 years since the Pleistocene have
fl own over on their migration.”
The Jamaica Bay-Rockaway Parks
Conservancy, NYC Audubon and
American Littoral Society are all partnering
with the Brooklyn Bird Club to
help bird-proof Jamaica Bay.