Yale University’s Bird-Friendly Building Initiative, a project that aims to accelerate the adoption of bird-friendly design in the built environment, has been recognized with a 2025 Excellence Award by the International Sustainable Campus Network (ISCN).
Yale won in the Partnerships for Progress category, which honors collaborations that engage external partners—from nonprofits to government to private industry—to disseminate knowledge, research, and best practices in ways that will benefit the communities they serve. The award was announced November 21.
Each year, an estimated one billion birds die from window collisions in North America alone. The Yale Bird-Friendly Building Initiative has been at the forefront of addressing this issue through extensive research, data collection on bird strikes, and the development of scalable policy recommendations.
Established in 2021, the project is a collaboration among the Law, Environment & Animals Program at Yale Law School, the Yale Peabody Museum, the Yale Office of Sustainability, the Yale Office of Facilities, and the American Bird Conservancy, with funding provided by Yale Planetary Solutions.
By working with experts from the American Bird Conservancy’s Glass Collisions Campaign, Yale researchers focused on identifying and evaluating city, state, and federal policies and strategies that would lead to more bird-safe building design at scale beyond Yale’s campus. Insights were compiled into a 2023 report, “Building Safer Cities for Birds,” as a resource for the public, advocates, and policymakers, along with a database of bird-friendly building policies in the U.S.
“The Yale Bird-Friendly Building Initiative shows how universities can lead meaningful environmental change by combining research excellence with cross-campus collaboration and partnerships, like with the American Bird Conservancy,” said Victoria Smith, ISCN’s Executive Director.
‘We can save thousands of birds’
The Initiative’s first project focused on monitoring bird strikes on campus and developing a data-driven action plan to substantially reduce bird-window collisions at Yale. Over five migration seasons, Yale researchers and students canvassed campus for birds that struck windows, collecting data which showed that a significant number of birds are killed by campus window collisions.
As a result of these insights, Yale updated its architectural design standards in 2023 to require that all new construction projects and major retrofits of existing façades employ bird-safe strategies. The Yale Economics Building, the Yale Peabody Museum, and the Living Village at Yale Divinity School have all been built or renovated with bird-safe glass over the past few years. At the same time, the university is retrofitting about a dozen problematic façades with bird-friendly adhesives—dot, line, or dash patterns that reduce a window’s reflectivity and help wild birds distinguish a building façade from open habitat.
These retrofitting solutions have been applied to substantial façade areas at Yale School of Management, Yale School of Nursing and the Yale Collections Study Center on West Campus, and the Prospect Sachem Garage. Smaller applications are being tested on numerous other buildings.
“We are studying different types of window film to determine the right one for each building,” says Cathy Jackson, Director of the Planning Administration in the Yale Office of Facilities. “Our early data suggest that these interventions have successfully reduced bird strikes in targeted areas.” The Initiative’s findings—including “before” and “after” results demonstrating the effectiveness of campus retrofits—will be published in a series of forthcoming scientific publications.
“With more than 22 million gross square feet of space spanning more than 530 buildings, Yale has the opportunity to save thousands of birds from unnecessary deaths on our campus,” says Viveca Morris, executive director of Yale’s Law, Environment & Animals Program.
The Initiative’s second project focused on identifying and evaluating bird-friendly building policies at the city, state, and national levels to accelerate the adoption and development of bird-friendly building design and materials. Those policies were compiled into the 2023 report and database.
Today, the Yale Bird-Friendly Building Initiative continues to analyze the effectiveness and impacts of existing bird-friendly policies with a goal to accelerate the development and adoption of impactful bird-friendly technologies for both new and existing buildings, using Yale’s campus as a test bed for various solutions.
New evidence of an elusive species
Research from the project has also broken new ground in the field of bird conservation. Morris recently co-authored an article in The Connecticut Warbler with Kristof Zyskowski, Ornithology Collections Manager at the Yale Peabody Museum, about the Bicknell’s Thrush, one of America’s rarest songbirds.
Yale researchers collected two Bicknell’s Thrushes, in 2018 and 2022, that were victims of window collisions in New Haven. These were among the first confirmed instances of the species dying in a window strike in the U.S. That confirmation—and remains of the birds, which are now among the Peabody’s collection—will advance efforts to protect the species, which is classified as vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, threatened in Canada, and as a species of concern in the U.S.
“These specimens are significant because they both provide evidence of this rare species’ presence in Connecticut and highlight its vulnerability to window collisions,” Morris says. “This is a species that has experienced more than 50 percent decline in population over the past half century and already has an alarmingly small population, so losing more individuals to avoidable window collisions is lamentable.”
Meanwhile, the Yale Bird-Friendly Building Initiative has begun experimenting with motion-activated camera traps to detect bird strikes in real-time. Funding from the Yale Planetary Solutions grant has enabled the hiring of a PhD student, Arata Honda, specializing in wildlife camera capture and AI analysis to set up cameras at several locations on Yale’s campus. This technology promises to provide more precise data and develop more effective prevention strategies.
“The recognition by ISCN is a validation of the importance of protecting biodiversity through bird-friendly policies and architectural design,” says Amber Garrard, Director of the Yale Office of Sustainability. “We are excited to apply lessons learned from Yale’s researchers on our campus, and hope that other institutions can also benefit and that we can collectively scale our impacts broadly across urban environments.”
Learn more about the Yale Bird-Friendly Building Initiative.