I am not an ornithologist or an architect or a person with particular expertise in any of the fields touched on by this website. I am a Singaporean living in Toronto who has spent nearly two decades volunteering for FLAP Canada. During spring and fall migrations, I and my fellow volunteers conduct early morning patrols of known collision hotspots across the Greater Toronto Area. 

Over the years, I have personally encountered hundreds of dead and injured birds. Some birds are in their best breeding plumage when I discover them, their eagerness to start the next generation cut short in an instant, after journeying for thousands of miles. Some are still warm when I find their lifeless bodies, killed just minutes earlier. I have seen birds hit glass above me and tumble in uncontrolled descent toward the ground. Some birds have taken their last breath in my hand.

The injured birds I have brought to the Toronto Wildlife Centre do not all survive, but the ones that do sometimes inspire me with their outsized courage. A white-throated sparrow that broke both its scapulae and its coracoid bone spent a week in a full-body wrap while its fractures healed, then built muscle, learned to fly again and was eventually released on its way south. Would I do as well? I sincerely doubt it.

I started this website in my personal capacity when I saw a Western hooded pitta fly at top speed into the second-storey window of a house in my mother's neighbourhood in the Bukit Timah area. I watched helplessly as it sat stunned for a long while under the window. I knew from experience that it would likely die of its internal injuries, even though it had survived the initial (hard) impact. It was then that I felt compelled to help raise awareness of the window collision issue in Singapore, to whatever small extent I could. While I have been so slowly working on this site, there has been increased attention paid to this issue in Singapore, thanks to the efforts of local scientists and activists -- and, correspondingly, a heartening response from the public. I hope BirdSafeSG contributes in a small way to those efforts.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank, for their help and encouragement, Ms Jasvic Lye and Ms Anbarasi (Anbu) Boopal of ACRES; Dr Tan Yen Yi of the Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum; Mr Tang Kean Seng of Project Avigate, NTU;  Dr Yong Ding Li of BirdLife International; Dr Movin Nyanasengeran of the Bird Society of Singapore; and, of course, the wonderful people of FLAP Canada.

But the opinions expressed and any errors committed herein are entirely my own.

Photographs

Thanks to Benh Lieu Song, CollidEscape, Patricia Homonylo, Jasvic Lye, Eileen McConnell, Ng Yu Gin, Project Avigate, Ann Sanderson and Jennifer Tan for the use of their photographs. 

All uncredited photographs on the site are my own. The photographs of residential homes are to provide examples only -- I do not have information about actual bird collisions at these sites and do not mean to suggest that any have occurred. 

Contact 

Write to Vicki Low at birdsafesg@gmail.com