This is for the Birds

I need a lot of windows. I knew this after living in a couple homes that didn’t have enough. When I designed my house, I thought about monastic life, and I thought about the trees, but I incorrectly assumed that birds would have the sense not to fly into the windows.

This was an urgent issue, and I’ve been improving the system steadily. Firstly, I keep the feeders far enough from the house and on the side where the strikes are the least frequent.

I read some good science-based articles that indicated that songbirds will not try to fit through a 4″ gap in branches when flying. That means any hawk and owl stickers need to be 4″ apart. Apparently songbirds are not fooled that they are seeing a hawk or an owl. There are one-way films that can be applied to glass, but that would reduce the much wanted solar gain in the winter, after the leaves fall and temperatures drop.

The best solution that I ran into was hanging strings every 4″ from the exterior of the window trim. I went ahead and did this last year. It helped a great deal, but the strings blow and get tangled, and small birds do try to fit through them occasionally. I also couldn’t reach the top tier of windows on my south wall.

So I built a span out of some leftover boat supplies. Fiberglass, epoxy, and cedar. The idea was to build a light, rigid structure, with all the strings in place that I could quickly drop off the eave, and not monkey around on a 25 foot ladder tying 64 knots.

I adjusted the spacing to 3″ which should even make the kinglets hesitate.

Before painting, you can see the fiberglass encased cedar spacers. The white rods are just fiberglass and epoxy resin, and the cord is paracord.

In this closeup, you can see the fillets that stabilize the rods in the cedar. They are epoxy mixed with fine sawdust.

All painted, and the cords are bundled. The paint helped those knots hold securely. I gooped them pretty well. In THEORY, the unit can be dropped over the eave with a rapid and safe install. It’s not in the picture, but I used Kevlar cord to suspend it. Highly abrasion resistant with high tensile strength with dynamic loads.

It’s up! Look closely under the eave… The cords aren’t untangled yet, and you can see the mess of old cords hung up on the J-channel of the windows. These were removed. The roof was dry for all of 20 minutes, I dropped it in, and then it started to snow. Whew!

In this picture from inside, you can see my gangly Platycerium, but looking out the windows, you don’t readily notice the strings. Hopefully the birds will see them, though!

So far, the new curtain has worked beautifully! No strikes all week. They are more frequent on sunny days, so I will be looking closely this next week.

UPDATE

It works. Thank goodness. No serious impacts on that window wall of the house yet. Also, the chickadees like to grasp the cords, so I get to see them, up close!