2025 Award Winner: Yale University

Yale Bird-Friendly Building Initiative: Creating Bird-friendly Buildings on Campus and Beyond

Glass collisions kill up to 1 billion birds every year in North America. These bird deaths are preventable. The Yale Bird-Friendly Building Initiative was established in 2021 to accelerate the development and adoption of bird-safe building design and materials on Yale’s campus and beyond. The Initiative is a collaboration of the Law, Environment & Animals Program at Yale Law School, the Yale Peabody Museum, the Yale Office of Facilities, the Yale Office of Sustainability, and American Bird Conservancy, with funding provided by Yale Planetary Solutions. Our first project focused on monitoring bird strikes on Yale’s campus and developing a data-driven action plan to significantly reduce bird-window collisions at Yale. Our second project focused on identifying and evaluating bird-friendly building policies at the city, state, and national levels to accelerate the adoption and development of bird-friendly building design and materials.

Currently, hundreds, and likely thousands, of birds are killed by window collisions every year on our campus. At a single Yale building where bird strikes were monitored from April 2018 to April 2022, more than 400 birds of more than 50 species were killed or injured due to window-strikes. By retrofitting problematic facades with bird-friendly film and updating our design standards to require that new buildings follow rigorous bird-friendly standards, the university is accelerating efforts to save countless wild birds and to become a model for how institutions can support wildlife-friendly design. With more than 22 million gross square feet of space spanning more than 530 buildings, Yale has the opportunity to save thousands of birds from unnecessary deaths on our campus.

In partnership with American Bird Conservancy’s Glass Collisions Campaign experts, Yale researchers focused on identifying and evaluating city, state, and federal policies and strategies to accelerate the adoption of bird-safe building design at scale beyond Yale’s campus. Over the past two decades, more than a dozen cities and towns across America—most notably New York City—have adopted bird-friendly design requirements, usually by modifying building or zoning codes for certain types of new buildings. Legislation aimed at reducing bird mortality has also been proposed at the state and federal levels. These efforts are significant but remain limited in reach and rarely apply to pre-existing buildings.In 2023, we published the report “Building Safer Cities for Birds” as a resource for the public, advocates, and policymakers, along with a database of bird-friendly building policies in the U.S. Today, the Yale Bird-Friendly Building Initiative continues to analyze the effectiveness and impacts of existing bird-friendly policies with a goal to propose new policy strategies to accelerate the development and adoption of bird-friendly technologies for both new and existing buildings.

Learn more about the Yale Bird-Friendly Building Initiative.