The Dead Bird Rabbit Hole

This is Outside In, a show where curiosity and the natural world collide.

I'm Nate Hedgie.

Well, good morning.

In the spring of 2024, right around dawn, producer Taylor Quimby visited the World Trade Center complex in Manhattan.

He was there to meet a volunteer.

Good, how are you doing?

Thanks so much for letting me tag along.

Of course.

I already did a quick circuit just to make sure there were no nocturnal collisions before they got swept up.

This is Melissa Breyer.

She works in this neighborhood.

But this morning, she walked right past her office building, her eyes trained on the ground.

How did you discover the program?

Well, it was during the pandemic lockdown and everything was so...

We're going to go this way.

It was so tense and hard in New York City.

I was getting a lot of emotional relief from looking at birds in Central Park on Twitter during spring migration of 2020 because that was weird in peak lockdown.

And then a photo crossed my Twitter feed of a bunch of dead birds all on a sidewalk that were all found one morning.

And I was like...

Whoa.

So then I just went down the dead bird rabbit hole.

My whole Twitter just became dead birds.

Melissa Breyer is what you might call a dead birder.

She's one of a number of volunteers who look for migrating songbirds that have crashed into glass windows and then plummeted to the pavement.

She even documents her findings on an Instagram account called Sad Birding.

And look at how beautiful they are.

They're so unusual looking.

Look at a little hummingbird.

Wow.

Look at that.

That was one morning.

You're holding one, two, three, four, five birds in each hand, and there's another ten or so on the ground.

I

found 41 birds that day according to my notes here.

These were nine Blackburnian warblers, nine of the same bird.

It was probably part of a flock, if not a whole flock.

A lot of people have encountered a dead bird on the sidewalk.

But these kinds of collisions are much more than freak accidents.

So today on Outside In, we are playing a favorite episode from 2024 in which producer Taylor Quimby is taking us down the dead bird rabbit hole to learn about just how many birds are smashing into our windows and to meet the volunteers and scientists that are doing something about it.

When I tell people about it, they're like, that's so depressing.

And I'm like, I know it really is, isn't it? But I just, I don't know.

It makes you not want to stop until every building is fixed.

Sous-titrage Société Radio-Canada Sous-titrage Société Radio-Canada