Becoming “That Bird Guy”

Brendon Samuels hopes to change the way we think about birds and sustainability in the built environment.

By Matthew R. Brown

How does a self-described “city kid” born in Richmond Hill without much exposure to ecological knowledge end up with a PhD in the Department of Biology at Western University where he studies strategies for preventing bird-building collisions? In the case of 32-year-old Brendon Samuels, it is a combination of a natural fondness for animals and nature, supportive parents, a strong desire to better the state of the natural world, and a bit of luck that earned him the nickname of “that bird guy” in his current home of London, Ontario.

Growing up, Brendon recalls being drawn to animals, including pets and wildlife. This led him to working at a pet store as a teenager, where he grew fond of a parrot that was on display and eventually came home with him.

“I got to experience companionship with a bird that taught me a great deal about how much our species have in common,” Brendon says. “I was fortunate that my parents valued travel and exposed me to different landscapes – like beaches and forests and deserts and lakes – and experiencing those places also introduced me to some of the intersections of environmental and social issues affecting animals and nature.”

Being interested in animals, Brendon completed a Masters degree in neuroscience at Western University that focussed on birds. Through experimental design, Brendon wanted to compare the ways that humans and songbirds process the rhythmic organization of sound, as in the regular beat pattern that people perceive in many genres of music.

“Some of the parrots I had interacted with were prolific ‘dancers’ and I was curious about the euroanatomical basis of this behaviour,” Brendon says. “After studying bird hearing for awhile, I decided that I wanted to pursue a PhD and to choose a topic that would allow me to apply what I had learned to solve a problem facing the natural world in a meaningful way.”

Brendon’s academic supervisor from his Masters understood that he was anxious about the state of our planet and felt a responsibility to devote himself to help other species – looking at window collisions as a visual sensory problem for birds was mentioned as a possibility. His supervisor pointed him to a nonprofit organization called the Fatal Light Awareness Program (FLAP) Canada in Toronto.

“I then attended one of FLAP’s annual ‘bird layout’ events at the Royal Ontario Museum, where thousands of dead birds collected by FLAP volunteers were laid out in a pattern on the floor,” Brendon says. “It was a profound experience that changed my life and the way I thought about birds and sustainability in the built environment. I was hooked, and beyond the research I pursued for my PhD, I became motivated to work with FLAP to prevent the harms I was witnessing in any way I could.”

According to “A First Estimate for Canada of the Number of Birds Killed by Colliding with Building Windows” (Machtans et al. 2013), the number of birds that die from collisions each year in Canada is in the 16 to 42 million range. Brendon thinks the true number is at the upper limit of that range.

“As conservationists, we should move beyond focusing on mortality figures alone – even non-lethal collisions can cause injuries that expose birds to other threats, like being more vulnerable to predation by domestic cats,” Brendon says. “Birds that are killed partway through their breeding cycle will be unable to attend to their offspring, yet the deaths of those offspring are not counted as collisions mortality.”

Preventing bird-building collisions is about more than just feeling empathy toward the different species we share our planet with. It is about helping to restore natural environments.

“Let’s suppose, for example, you treat a single window with visual markers to prevent bird collisions and as a result, a young songbird who visits your backyard manages to avoid a lethal collision,” Brendon says. Imagine the number of seeds that individual bird can disperse over its uninterrupted lifespan, each with the potential to grow into plants and trees that themselves will sequester carbon and eventually reproduce.”

What can we do to help?

So, what can you do as an individual or as part of an organization or business to protect birds and help ensure their part of healthy, diverse ecosystems? Brendon believes even small actions can add up to a lot of protection if enough people act together. He suggests:

• Prioritizing the restoration of bird habitat by planting native species that support the insects that birds depend on for food.
• Mitigating human-caused threats to birds, including predation by domestic cats. Training cats while they are young to accept wearing a leash and harness while outside or to use an enclosure like a “catio” is an important, beneficial action to keep pets and birds safe.
• Helping birds avoid collisions with glass on buildings, including windows and railings by treating glass with visual markers arranged in a dense pattern, applied on the exterior surface. See flap.org for tips.
• Businesses and corporations can have large positive effects on bird population recovery. Treating glass to prevent collisions is not limited to residences; we also need to ensure new and existing commercial buildings are made bird safe through the adoption of standards like CSA A460 Bird Friendly Building Design in renovations and new construction. Also, there may be opportunities to switch procurement of materials like coffee and chocolate to promote bird-friendly agricultural practices.

“There are also many ways in which people depend on birds, but don’t necessarily recognize, and so the services and functions birds provide are taken for granted,” Brendon says. “For example, the migratory birds that we are trying to conserve in Canada spend the non-breeding period each year in the southern hemisphere on coffee farms, where they consume pest insects.” More birds means less pesticide, which means cheaper coffee and healthier communities.

Outside of the value birds provide from the perspective of ecosystem services and agriculture, Brendon hopes that more people protect birds because they see some of the things we strive for ourselves. “Birds are fortunate for having a lot of intrinsic appeal for many people – they are charismatic fauna that people readily see and identify with. People extend empathy to birds because we recognize in them traits that we value like beauty and parental care and sociality,” he says.