'Zen curtain' saves birds from hitting glass windows | Hacker News Reader

'Zen curtain' saves birds from hitting glass windows

abc.net.au

195 pointselorant62 comments

They should make one for people.

A Midwest bank was remodeling their in-supermarket branches with glass walls. It looked really spiffy and let in a lot more light. Then a few weeks later they had decals up on some of the glass panels and they were frosting others and I asked a teller why they changed.

It turns out that many people were slamming into the glass walls, usually when turning a corner quickly, (my guess: while staring at their phones!) and hurting themselves, so the bank decided it was better to get ahead of the inevitable lawsuit and make the clear glass more visible.

How we've managed to survive this long as a species is beyond me.

My church had the same problem. Put banners up in front of all the glass walls between the chapel and the rest of the church.

> How we've managed to survive this long as a species is beyond me.

I'm genuinely unclear if this is a dig at the people who walked into transparent walls, or the people who thought that designing and implementing a transparent wall was a good idea.

Why not both?

The blind leading the blind and both shall walk into a transparent wall.

Neither has to be blind to walk into that one. Just distracted.

(I too walked into a trasparent wall once, in an office I was unfamiliar with. How I cursed the people who kept it so clean it was invisible.)

Apple Park had to add a bunch of stickers on their walls because employees would keep walking into them.

Come to many parts of Europe and you might struggle to find a single full glass door or wall without a big red blob stuck on it, at around adult eye-level. If not that, a red dotted line.

It started way before smartphones. You’ll see it in villas and holiday homes presumably because the tourists get drunk and forget they closed the door to the terrace.

All I can think of is this clip which went around a while back. Still makes me laugh. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLeLgitVIl8

The African savanna is very coal- and coke-poor -- for most of our species' early history, our natural predators, like lions and cheetahs, were unable to produce sheet glass in large quantities. When humans started moving north into Eurasia, where coal deposits are more common, they were saved by the fact that the ursine glass industry was depressed by terrible protectionist laws up until the Bearton-Woofs Agreement in 1944.

The comment was funny enough, the animal puns sends it to another dimension. Heads up:

> 1944 Bretton Woods agreement established a new global monetary system. It replaced the gold standard with the U.S. dollar as the global currency.

The glass walls that line motorways in Poland have black decals stuck on them that look like the outlines of birds of prey. Supposedly, birds can’t tell the decal from the shadow of an actual threatening species that they would prefer to avoid, and so they don’t fly anywhere near the walls.

> "glass walls that line motorways"

I've never heard of this, why is it done? For aesthetic reasons? It seems like it would be marginally less practical than solid barriers which would block out headlights at night.

These barriers are put up for sound-proofing reasons. Mostly the barriers are opaque, but one often encounters the glass ones at the points along these routes when they run through towns. Here, the glass barriers provide soundproofing without blocking one’s view of the surrounding cityscape.

sound-reducing reasons*

Sorry for the nitpick, but I live near a highway with one of these barriers and it's in no way sound-proofing.

Were you able to experience it without the barrier?

No, but with it I can still hear the highway. I'm sure it's certainly not as bad as it is without it, and I'm thankful it's there, but it's still audible. It sounds like it's maybe 2 or 3 blocks away vs right in your back yard.

To block noise, without blocking light. See for example [0] (in Budapest, Hungary), where the house would not get much light during the day with a solid barrier and it's also kinda depressing to stare at a wall immediately in front of your window (even a busy road is a better view). (Note also the bird stickers.)

[0] http://iho.hu/img/kozut/111004_kaotikuskoki/zajfal.jpg

They have them all over the place her in Czech Republic - bus stations, train stations, university buildings, anywhere with large glass panels or windows exposed to the outside world. I never noticed much of a bird-window-suicide problem back in the UK even though we had a big glass conservatory at my house

> I never noticed much of a bird-window-suicide problem back in the UK even though we had a big glass conservatory at my house

Particular lighting conditions make the glass act like a partial mirror, giving the impression of open space. It's more common in strong sunlight, which is why it's rare in the UK

Tall glass buildings have a unique bird-window-suicide problem in that birds often migrate at moderate altitudes at night.

I just took a week-long road trip across Poland and noticed these. Thanks for the explanation!

My current desk faces a large wall sized window, ground floor, all glass building, surrounded by trees. At first I was excited to finally face a window, but I have seen SO many birds slam into it and die on impact. Walking around the perimeter, depending on the time of year, you'll see dead birds every 20 feet or so. this sounds promising

Just that small building causes 4-5 bird deaths per day? Good lord.

The picture in the article reminds me of an old youtube video that suggests painting thin white vertical stripes on your windows. Supposedly the birds avoid flying between the vertical gaps. Horizontal lines aren't as effective. I wonder who first discovered this method.

> Just that small building causes 4-5 bird deaths per day? Good lord.

He did say that it only happens during "this time of year". Collisions with buildings kill up to 1 billion birds per year in the US [1], so that sounds about right.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_wind_p...

This reminds me of the awareness efforts by the Nature History museum in Rotterdam with the celebration of Dead Duck Day [1].

The case study's[2] abstract documents:

_On 5 June 1995 an adult male mallard (Anas platyrhynchos) collided with the glass façade of the Natuurmuseum Rotterdam and died. An other drake mallard raped the corpse almost continuously for 75 minutes._

Quite an interesting—albeit disturbing—read.

[1] https://www.hetnatuurhistorisch.nl/activiteiten/dead-duck-da...

[2] https://www.hetnatuurhistorisch.nl/fileadmin/user_upload/doc...

Perhaps less visually distracting to the people inside the buildings, would be to create the same “striating patterns” on the building using those large decals that are used for public-transit advertising.

Yes, this is also common and covered in the article...

Nice to see Twitter finally being used solve problems for birds themselves.

I wonder if the same tactics can be applied for apple developers...

We did it to ourselves with this modern "glass walls and doors everywhere" design trend.

I wonder how this actually works?

I regularly place seeds on my deck railing to feed the birds (and the squirrels). They knock some of the seeds to the deck floor.

Some birds go for the seeds on the deck floor. Those birds frequently fly between the balusters, both when coming and going. The balusters are 1.5" across, with 5" gaps between them.

Based on watching those birds, I would not have expected a "zen curtain" to help. I'd expect birds to think they could simply fly through the gaps.

The birds aren't aiming for seeds on the other side and have no motivation to fly through the ropes?

> Mr Hines has been burying the birds that die in the nearby garden, and has been taking the birds that survive to a local vet.

I thought Lorikeets were classified as pests in both Western Australia and Queensland. A few years ago my mother and I found an injured baby Rainbow Lorikeet in the middle of the road (some kind of wing injury). We put it in a box and went to the vet. Right before handing it over, I happened to ask the receptionist: "You guys aren't going to just kill him or anything, right?"

That is when the receptionist decided to tell me that because Rainbow Lorikeets are considered pests, that is exactly what they would do. They wouldn't even look at the bird's injury.

I took him home instead; he recovered and went on to live with me. I really hope that this person had some kind of agreement or assurance from the vet that they would actually help the birds. Of course not every bird that flies into a window can be saved, but if he was taking them there expecting them to get some kind of general diagnosis or treatment those birds may not have gotten the ending he was expecting.

My place of employment desperately needs something like this. We have a number of sky bridges between buildings that are just a suspended hallway with floor to ceiling windows on both sides, so to birds it looks like they can fly through. We're located at the edge of the city, so there are just rolling hills of farmland and more natural space for birds to approach from. I regularly see dead birds under the sky bridges.

Maybe stick something on the inside of the window?

What I find fascinating about this is that there's probably a set of neurons in bird brains that specifically fire when looking at vertical lines. Here's a live recording of this effect from a cat[0], also known as the Hubel and Wiesel[1] experiment. Now those are being triggered, causing the bird to avoid the glass. This is an exceedingly simple solution to the problem. Very impressive!

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cw5PKV9Rj3o

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torsten_Wiesel

This is an old trick used on homes, except window paint (typically white) is used to make thin vertical lines about 6 inches apart. It doesn't affect your view and it doesn't look ugly if you use a straight guide and thin lines.

My previous house one year a male Cardinal thought he saw a rival in a window and attacked it over and over again for what seemed like hours (his reflection). The female sat on the fence and I could swear was enjoying it.

That happened at my house (though with a different species). I closed the shade, which disrupted the reflection, so that the bird would not harm itself or waste its energy unnecessarily.

My house has large glass windows. The temporary solution (nothing more permanent than a temporary soultion) to the frequent dead birds was to stick little pieces of bright green masking tape on the window.

I wonder how subtle the lines could be, and still work? Could a stripey near-invisible 'shadow line' be silkscreened on the glass before its installed?

Looks like a valid and clever solution for a problem. I wonder how this will stand wind, or if will create noise hitting against windows.

Good point, a flagpole with a single rope can be pretty noisy.

I recall a short video [0] gaining traction on this topic a while back with the simple solution of drawing the lines on windows with a marker pen.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UC9xQkUtQ98

That's the video! I instantly thought of that when I saw the picture in the article. Thanks, I wasn't able to find it.

Related-ish Planet Money episode:

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/07/28/540084544/epis...

Go to 16:40 for the related part.

I need a zen curtain on the front of my phone, my television, my laptop screen ... heck I need some zen everywhere

There was a particularly invisible glass wall in a parking lot near me. I guess enough people walked into it that they did the low-tech human version of this by sellotaping a piece of paper onto it that simply said “window”... I can’t imagine birds understanding that, but it was hilarious to see.

It's interesting how one community sees the rainbow lorikeet as an invasive pest that needs to be eliminated and another community is carefully redesigning buildings to save the poor rainbow lorikeets.

> carefully redesigning buildings to save the poor rainbow lorikeets.

I would guess that even if they aren't an an endangered species, dealing with dead and injured birds daily is a nuisance. Simple measures like this, less nuisance in the long run.

All native wildlife in Australia is protected -- cute cuddly and deadly poisonous animals equally.

Lizards, spiders and insects found in a home are often caught and released outside in the garden rather than killed (especially the huge huntsman spiders we get here which are harmless to humans). I'll even catch and release cockroaches rather than kill them.

Yes, but they're not native to Western Australia. They were introduced by accident in the 1960s.

They were also accidentally introduced to New Zealand in the 1990s by some idiot in North Shore who released large numbers of captive ones.

I've seen a church in Kerala, India use plastic chain curtains over their doors to prevent birds flying inside. Seems they are commonly used for this purpose.

Twenty years ago a friend of mine sold something similar for houses. We live in the mountains, lots of birds, lots of bird-window collisions.

Why is it called a 'Zen curtain'?

Saving you a click: because "Zen" is a marketing term meaning "calm or peaceful". Birds not slamming into glass is considered to be peaceful. Not be confused with the "Zen" of Zen Buddhism, where it doesn't mean that at all.

> Not be confused with the "Zen" of Zen Buddhism...

Or motorcycle maintenance.

Many consider "Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance" a modern-day Buddhist parable though the author states it specifically not to be..

It does fit with the Zen Koan sort of if described - what sort of curtains are on the outside of a window and don't block light or noise? Not quite "What is the sound of one hand clapping." meditative question but it is getting there in surface weirdness.

This lot call it a "bird saver":

https://www.birdsavers.com/buildyourown.html

Zen it's all about being in concordance with nature

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