Research into bird impacts is still at an early stage, and only a few universities in Europe address this topic, according to behavioural biologist Dominique Waddoup, who has been working intensively on this issue for years and is developing her own solutions for bird protection. In the following exclusive interview, she discusses the current state of research and explains how test options can be further developed and what more realistic test scenarios might look like.
Interview with Dominique Waddoup on bird protection glass
BirdShades
GW-NEWS: How can you tell whether a glass product reduces bird collisions and how realistic are the flight tunnel tests?
BirdShades
Dominique Waddoup: I have been working on this question very hard over the last few years and have found that there is still no generally valid research method and the topic is extremely complex. You could fill several books with it. Therefore, I can only give a very rough overview here: Essentially, the effectiveness of products for preventing window collisions in birds would have to be investigated in the field by first equipping glass surfaces with and then without bird impact protection for a period of time and measuring the number of bird strikes. That is why there is a simplified method in German-speaking countries that is very well known in the glass industry: the flight tunnel test, which is carried out in a dark flight tunnel with two glass panes at the end. In this test set-up, a bird escapes from the interior of a dark room towards a bright opening where there are two options. One glass pane is made of bird protection glass, while the other is not. The animals are caught by a thin net before they hit the glass, and the system records which glass variant the bird has chosen. The effectiveness of the glass is then determined based on the number of birds that would have flown into it.
GW-NEWS: How conclusive is a test like this?
The problem with this is that you don't know how the bird-protection products will perform later in the field under real light conditions. So far, there have been no studies comparing the results of such artificial test conditions with results in the field. What is missing is calibration. I see enormous potential here for international cooperation between researchers and industry stakeholders to develop a test method that provides meaningful results for real-world conditions.
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BirdShades
For example, our bird protection film does not provide good results in a dark flight tunnel. However, this result is in contrast to three scientific studies that have now been conducted, which prove the effectiveness of BirdShades under natural light conditions.
GW-NEWS: What other tests are there?
In addition, there are other methods to determine whether products reduce bird strike. For example, there is a modern flight tunnel in the US that tests under daylight conditions. However, the transfer of these results to real-world results in the field is also an issue here. Another method is the use of data loggers directly on glass surfaces and I think that this will be one of the pioneering methods in the future.
GW-NEWS: How did you proceed with your own product development of bird protection glass?
We started with our own behavioural experiments, which we developed in collaboration with the University of Graz in Austria. In a further step, promising prototypes were tested in an open flight tunnel with daylight by the renowned behavioural biologist John Swaddle in the US. The next step was to transfer the laboratory conditions to the field, where we carried out time-consuming field monitoring studies.
GW-NEWS: How do these studies or tests work?
These studies are conducted according to the BACI concept (Before/After & Control/Impact). The monitoring takes place for a certain period of time before the bird protection product is installed and then for a certain period of time afterwards. In addition, an untreated control area is also monitored in the period after installation in order to obtain information about general situations in the field (e.g. there could be many or very few birds in the area). We are currently participating in a study with data loggers with our products (www.birdshades.com), as well as in other field monitoring studies worldwide.
GW-NEWS: What is needed to make bird protection products comparable?
Ideally, a combination of modern flight tunnel setups and professional monitoring studies would be required. Monitoring studies provide very good data to determine the bird strike situation before and after installation. In addition, modern flight tunnel experiments can also provide helpful insights. In the flight tunnel, for example, we were able to determine that neither visible solutions nor our UV bird-protection film on the inside of the window are effective.
GW-NEWS: What is your company currently working on?
We are continuing to develop our transparent bird-protection film by incorporating additional functions such as sun shading. At the same time, we are working with universities on research projects to ensure that our product development remains evidence-based.
The interview was conducted by Matthias Rehberger
BirdShades
