Week 3 Journal Entry - Winter Quarter

On Tuesday the 18th of January, I went for a preliminary survey of the buildings at UCSC. I walked by buildings I knew were of interest to me, for our study, while also letting my naturalist mind take me on a journey throughout the campus lands. I walked through Baskin Engineering, knowing that the ENG 2 building was of interest because of its large stature and amount of windows. I used the Baskin ENG 2 building as my model for a building I think would have a lot of bird-window collision encounters. While walking through the campus I kept in mind the surrounding areas, the amount of glass I can see from my vantage point. I walked and found some buildings that have similar tunnels of glass that a bird might misinterpret as an open channel to fly through.

When walking through campus I considered the kind of stressors that might put a bird in a position where it ends up colliding with a window. I wanted to think about it this way because it helps consider the kinds of features in a building that might be pivotal. I looked through windows I had never looked at before but realized that they are sometimes at perfect heights for, in front of a tree, or next to a large cluster of trees. The buildings don’t necessarily need to be too high, but sometimes they maintain reflectivity of the surrounding environment that looks almost too realistic.

Yesterday, after meeting with (almost all) of this quarter’s bird-window collision project interns I feel like I may be a bit behind on the kind of work I should be doing. Yesterday was the day for my discussion revolving around the 2016 paper: Patterns of Bird Window Collisions inform mitigation on a University campus. I attempted to make talking points for this paper and to see what kinds of information would be most useful for the analysis of our project. After meeting with Natalia a bit earlier (before the group meeting) I realized that my work has been a bit focused on the general problem of bird-window collisions instead of my area of focus, involving the protocol and general set-up for the study. I think I am a bit disappointed in the fact that I didn't focus on this earlier, but now I have the time to do so.

I am thinking about ways to create the protocol in a user-friendly and timeless way so that it can be both a living document (to be amended or edited) while also function as a core document for future interns. Of course, things like google documents come to mind as an easily shared and distributed means of communicating the protocol. I don't think I want this protocol to live in only one place because I want some sort of ease of access to it for volunteers, naturalists, and interns of the future. Being required to access a link could determine life or death for a bird that has been a victim of a window collision.

My next steps are searching for protocol from other bird-window collision surveys and updating it with our needs at UCSC. I have also contacted Liana and Natalia about collaborating on the website and what kind of creative freedom we will be allowed when it comes to this.

In my investigation through more journal entries identifying protocol and methodology for the bird-window collision projects happening around the world, I came across a study in Poland (Żmihorski, Kotowska, & Zyśk-Gorczyńska,2022) where the COVID-19 worldwide plague was used as a means to control the survey protocol of bird-window collisions. The Google Forms survey was an encompassing questionnaire involving variables that describe the building (age, height, location, renovation, windows, etc.) and how many bird-window collision incidents this person is reporting. This is a great use of people’s time in isolation and creating a better understanding of residential impacts changing the standards of buildings to reflect bird-window collisions. Another interesting point brought up in the analysis of the crowd-sourced data generating a proximity variable to nearby reserves, which could be very interesting to think about with the UCSC bird-window collision project, considering we are on a natural reserve.