Live ones go in paper bags, dead ones in the freezer: the volunteers saving birds that fly into windows

Each year more than a billion birds die in North America after colliding with windows. Volunteers rescue those they can and collect the bodies of others. Their lives are honoured in an annual ‘Bird Layout’. This display from 2022 features more than 4,000 birds. Photograph: Patricia Homonylo

Every morning at dawn, a dozen volunteers scour the streets of Toronto picking up small birds. Some days they will find hundreds of them, most already dead or dying. A few they are able to save. Live birds are put in brown paper bags and driven to wildlife recovery centres, while dead birds are put in a large freezer. If no one picks them up, their carcasses are swept up by street cleaners.

“One of my first days was really horrific,” says Sohail Desai, a volunteer with the charity Fatal Light Awareness Program (Flap) Canada, which has about 135 people patrolling the streets across Toronto. Desai was walking close to his house in the North York area in Toronto when a flock of golden-crowned kinglets flew into a 15-storey glass building.