‘Imagine a world without their song’: Toronto photographer wins international award for picture of 4,000 dead birds

Thousands of dead birds, from kingfishers to blue jays, encircle a wild turkey to illustrate in one snapshot a mere fragment of how many die from colliding into glass windows – a death that can be easily prevented, the Torontonian photographer says.

This photograph, ‘When Worlds Collide,’ was captured by Patricia Homonylo. She is a conservation photojournalist who was just awarded the international title of bird photographer of the year for this piece.

The image beat out more than 23,000 photographs from across the world.

The bodies of 4,000 birds who died by window collisions were collected over the span of just one year, from a few city blocks in Toronto and Mississauga, Homonylo said. Then, they were meticulously arranged by members of Fatal Light Awareness Program (FLAP) Canada for, what Homonylo called, “the bird layout.”

“The volunteers gather once a year in order to create this beautiful display. It’s a difficult time. It is a necessary time,” Homonylo told CTV News Toronto in an interview. “It’s closure for the volunteers. It honours the birds lost … it’s like having a wake or a mourning.”

Perched over the top of a ladder with her camera out on a monopod, Homonylo said it’s the “only” way to see the scene and understand the magnitude of “the beauty and the tragedy” of what these birds represent.

“I want (people) to be shocked, and I want them to be angry, and I want them to demand of their governments for bird safe cities,” Homonlyo said.

Patricia Homonylo’s photograph ‘When Worlds Collide,’ featuring 4,000 birds that died from collisions with windows in Toronto. (Courtesy of Patricia Homonylo)

Environment Canada says between 16 to 42 million birds die from window collisions in the country every year. FLAP Canada reports more than 700,000 migratory birds have died so far this year – a number that rapidly increases on their website.

That pales in comparison to the U.S., the agency adds, which sees up to 988 million birds dying from this same cause.

“We’re losing our migratory bids at a catastrophic rate, and imagine a world without their song,” Homonlyo said.

‘Easiest issue to resolve’

There are two characteristics of buildings that pose a threat to birds, Michael Mesure, FLAP’s co-founder and executive director, tells CTV News Toronto, and it all comes down to the glass itself: the transparent qualities of glass where birds think they see a clear passage through, or windows reflecting the surrounding habitat.

“The interesting thing about this issue is we’ve all at some point in time experienced this, at our homes, our cottages, our workplace – we’ve all seen or heard a bird hit a window,” Mesure said.

“The other part of this, it isn’t just happening during the migration seasons, like most people think, it’s happening all year round, affecting a mass variety of species. This is why it’s now considered the second-leading cause of bird death across the country.”

Preventing their death is also the easiest and fastest issue to resolve, Mesure said.

“Let’s say there’s a lake that’s been killed by chemicals and efforts are made to bring that lake back to life. Well, that doesn’t happen overnight, that takes months, years, sometimes decades to see that lake come back to life again. You apply windows to markers, the moment you do that, and you do it properly, you’re reducing that threat by anywhere from 80 to 90 per cent,” Mesure said.

The key is to make the entire window look like a barrier to birds, and FLAP outlines a slew of window marker guidelines for Canadians to follow. On a Toronto-wide level, in 2007, the city enacted bird-friendly development guidelines providing a list of strategies for buildings to follow, including how to make glass less dangerous and how to curb light pollution making glass less dangerous and mitigating light pollution, as lights can throw birds off course.

Under Ontario’s Environmental Protection Act (EPA) and Canada’s Species at Risk Act (SARA), it is an offence for a building to emit reflected light that kills or injures birds.

“These current standards are now being used as templates all across North America,” Mesure said. “That’s all wonderful news. The problem we’re finding is the vast majority of bids are dying at existing buildings. And there’s no guidelines, policies, bylaws, mandatory requirements coming from the municipal level to address that concern.”