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This common flameback died after flying into a window in the Ulu Pandan-Clementi area. Photo by Jennifer Tan
Most birds that collide with windows die unnoticed. They may decompose where they fall or get swept up by a cleaner and dumped into a garbage bin. Homeowners may bury them in a garden bed or they may become a food source for another animal. It may seem like the normal cycle of life and death, but window collisions are an unnatural cause of death for birds. It is not just the weak and old that are taken, but also the strong and healthy -- often while tending to nestlings that will now starve and die as well.
If you see a bird killed by a window, you can help make a meaningless death count for something by taking one or more of the following actions.
Dead Bird Hotline
If a bird hits your window and is killed, please call the Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum's Dead Bird Hotline at +65 9876 4997 or contact Dr Tan Yen Yi at yenyi.tan@nus.edu.sg. Be sure to take photos from different angles of the bird (for species identification), noting the date and time of collision as well as the location (GPS coordinates if possible). Wrap the bird in a paper towel or newspaper, put it in a plastic bag and keep it on ice or in a freezer, if possible, so that the carcass will not start to decompose before it can be collected.
Global Bird Collision Mapper
You may also want to log the collision on the Global Bird Collision Mapper (GBCM). This is a global database of bird-window collisions that is accessible to the public. Your participation will help raise awareness and advance the understanding of where and when bird collisions happen worldwide, so that building owners can take steps to make their windows safer for birds.
A blue-throated bee-eater, preserved as a specimen in the Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum holdings
The Value of a Dead Bird
Birds collected by the Dead Bird Hotline will be preserved and added to the holdings of the Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum. The collection forms an important repository for the scientific study of Singapore fauna.
An interesting example of how such collections can yield new insights is recounted in the book Crossings, by Ben Goldfarb. An ornithologist named Charles Brown who studied cliff swallows that nest under highway bridges noticed that, over some three decades, the number of swallows struck and killed by motor vehicles had decreased. When Brown went back through his collection of cliff swallows killed by cars that he had preserved over the years, he found by comparing them to live ones that the pressure of having to survive on the roadway had clearly selected in favour of swallows with shorter wings, which allow birds to manouevre more quickly in flight. As Goldfarb observes, "It was Darwinian selection in action, so clean and rapid it belonged in a textbook."
Preserved as part of the Lee Kong Chian Museum's collection, the dead bird you have found will add to the field of Singaporean ornithology.
A drawer full of specimens at the Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum
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