Anyone who has sat near a window may have experienced the startling moment when a bird smacks into it. Like the famous scene when a pelican's crash startles a dentist into an inadvertent tooth-pull in "Finding Nemo," it can seem cartoonishly silly when a gracefully soaring red-tailed hawk or empty-eyed dumpy pigeon abruptly stops and plops into a pane of glass. If the bird is lucky, it will wobble in the air for a few seconds before regaining its sense of avian dignity and flying off. Yet when the feathered navigator is less fortunate, it flops to the ground — quite often, dead.
"We also know that not all birds that hit windows die... the survivors may be injured, perhaps even breaking a wing – and it's likely that many of these individuals don't survive for long, either dying from their injuries or taken by predators."
