Bird City, Milwaukee County is a monthly column celebrating the 11 cities, towns, and villages that have achieved Bird City status within Milwaukee County. Citizens of these locations have made bird conservation a priority, protecting land, writing ordinances, and educating the public on issues concerning our avian neighbors. You can learn more about the Bird City Network by visiting its website. This month: the Village of Brown Deer.
Last month we took in the last rays of summer on the shores of Lake Michigan in Whitefish Bay. With full fall upon us, we’re venturing inland to explore the western bank of the Milwaukee River and beyond as we celebrate the Village of Brown Deer. Hometown of Bucks player/broadcast Steve Novak, Brown Deer is a quaint 4.4 square mile community that is often seen as a bridge to other communities along the county’s north shore. While small, the Village has been a part of the Bird City program since 2014. One of Brown Deer’s initiatives, updating the village hall’s lighting, is a key reminder that everyone can help birds this fall by turning lights off in the evening. We’ll talk more about this topic in this week’s Q&A with Matt Igleski the Executive Director for Chicago Bird Alliance; for now, let’s head over to Brown Deer.
You’d think going to Brown Deer means checking out Brown Deer Park, one of the more robust green spaces in the area. Oddly enough, Brown Deer Park is located in neighboring Glendale. Instead, Brown Deer is home to four pocket-sized parks: A.C. Hanson, Algonquin, Badger Meter River, Village parks. Of the four, both Badger Meter River Park and Village Park are listed as habitat focus pieces in Brown Deer’s Bird City initiatives, while A.C. Hanson is a spot that benefited from the Land & Water Conservation Fund. Brown Deer’s parks may be small, but the Village does a great job maximizing the green space they have so that it’s beneficial to area wildlife.
Village Park might be the most recognizable park of the bunch thanks to a historical white school built in 1884. The park has underrated birding thanks to two bodies of water: Beaver Creek, and a pond that connects the park to the Oak Leaf Trail. This mix of habitats, albeit small, attracts variety. I was elated to find a Spotted Sandpiper, a shorebird that likes to forage for food in sand and mud. While I was there it shared the pond with mallards, Canada geese, and killdeer. The park’s other water feature is larger and less open, perfect for a solitary great blue heron. In addition to great birding, Village Park hosts a popular farmer’s market.
If you miss the opportunity to snag fresh farmer’s market veggies, I recommend a visit to Urban Beets Cafe & Juicery (5091 W. Brown Deer Rd.; 414-206-4899). I’m a carnivore at heart but I’m impressed with the evolution of plant-based food offerings over the past decade. Urban Beets does the concept well, from its tropical Buddha bowl to its bagel sandwich that replaces the egg with a tasty chickpea frittata. It’s a subtle change that left me full and reenergized for more Brown Deer birding.
Badger Meter River Park is a mouthful of a name for a pretty nondescript space hugging the Milwaukee River. Hidden in the foliage is a tiny path that takes you along a wooded stream. It’s a great spot for medium-sized songbirds like the gray catbird. On foot, there’s not a ton to explore, though a patient morning could be fruitful. The real highlight is ditching the hiking boots for one’s sea legs, and using the park as a landing point for personal boating action. I ran into canoers who spotted green herons, belted kingfishers, and egrets during their time on the river.
Like Village Park, A.C. Hanson is also on the Oak Leaf Trail, and like Badger Meter, A.C. makes for a quick walk. I enjoyed the respite it provides thanks to the birdsong courtesy of the local northern cardinals, American robins, blue jays, and American goldfinch populations. It’s also a great chipmunk spot! There are a few little nature nooks and crannies and one took me to an ode to a pet mouse named Despereaux, deceased but not forgotten.
While we’re on the topic of death, let’s talk about how we can prevent it for many of the birds that travel our urban night skies. This month’s discussion takes us south of Wisconsin’s border, where we can pick up tips from a city that’s done a tremendous job of navigating the issues surrounding evening light’s effect on birds and glass collisions.
Q&A With Matthew Igleski, Executive Director for the Chicago Bird Alliance (Chicago Chapter of Audubon Great Lakes)
Milwaukee Record: To get an overview of the Lights Out Program I feel like it’s important to start at the problem the program is trying to address. To the human eye it seems like birds would be more likely to fly into buildings if the lights are off because they’d have a harder time seeing the buildings, so can you help dispel that line of thinking? Why is evening light more of a problem for birds than darkness?
Matthew Igleski: Yeah, it feels counterintuitive. And so I think the first thing to understand is that a lot of birds are small and migrate at night. Since they’re migrating at night, they have a lot of other things like stars and geographic landmarks that they’re using to navigate. In Milwaukee and Chicago, the edge of Lake Michigan is a big flyway, it’s that type of landmark that they use and attracts birds. At the same time, and we don’t really know why, but light seems to draw them in. So in big cities they all get concentrated downtown and stuck there. So that’s half of the phenomena. The other half comes at daybreak. For whatever reason we just build every building in a facade of reflective glass, and those facades reflect back trees or corners of buildings. Tiny birds are used to going full-speed thinking they can make it through small spaces like trees and that ends up creating these scenarios where every morning large numbers of birds are colliding with buildings.
MR: How widespread has the problem become? As people living in the Midwest/Great Lakes region, is this issue more important for us to consider due to our place on the Mississippi migratory flyway?
MI: In terms of bird-related issues, it’s issue number two or three. Number one is always going to be habitat loss, but then it drops down to issues with cats and collisions. It’s something like 600 million to 1 billion birds that are dying in big urban cities each year due to collisions. And the bigger concern on top of that is urban sprawl, which expands these large nighttime light sources that draw birds in.
MR: I think people will associate this problem with city skyscrapers, and while I want to talk more about that, I also want to ask if residential properties are connected to this problem. Should people in residential pockets consisting of one- and two-story houses make changes in their homes?
MI: It’s hard to really gauge where that line is, but I would just tell people to be conscious of it. Motioned lights, timed lights, and down-facing lights so you’re not radiating light into the night sky are all better than just keeping outdoor lights on. In terms of the collision aspect, if you can draw curtains that helps break up single panes of glass. American Bird Conservancy has a great list of products that can help with problem windows. And problem windows aren’t always the big window. It’s just whatever window reflects the plants or trees just right to cause an issue.
MR: Let’s go back to skyscrapers and talk about the type of efforts people can take to help our downtowns with these problems.
MI: The first thing is to come up with a type of program or alert system. The City of Chicago has a great web page, and honestly speaking with the City of Milwaukee itself is a great place to start. The City of Chicago creates an alert that basically reminds buildings when to turn off their lights, or when there are big migration numbers. Sites like BirdCast have been great tools to monitor regional migration and it allows us to target just the big nights when having lights off will be the most effective. But you want to get the city on board, maybe through a meeting with a local Audubon chapter.
MR: Tell me about some of the issues you’ve had setting up Chicago’s Lights Out Program?
MI: Our program is 100% volunteer in the sense that every building has to buy into the program. They have to make turning off lights a priority, and some won’t. There are still buildings in downtown Chicago that are literally a glass cube on a river because “that’s their brand,” but I think by and large, most buildings and things want to do better. I don’t think anyone wants to live in a building that kills birds. No one wants to work in a building that kills birds. Everyone’s pretty sad if they see like a dozen birds, you know, in front of their building.
And we also have to remember that solutions aren’t the same for every building. For instance, the infamous event of a thousand birds dying in a night last year at McCormick Place. After that happened we had meetings with them, and it took a long time to fix things because, let’s be real, some of these big lighting systems are hard to manage. They have exhibition spaces where things are happening all day, so nighttime is when all the staff are cleaning, and they need light to do their jobs. So we had to work with them to see what could be done, and that’s true for a lot of buildings. You have to address what the barriers of it are and find solutions that way.
With McCormick Place, I have to give kudos to them. They treated the glass with dots and it’s made a huge difference. I don’t know if anyone has an exact amount, but it looks like it’s between 50-70% of collisions have been mitigated because of that one change. It’s just about being proactive, which isn’t always easy in America. Sometimes we’re just waiting for something to go catastrophic before doing anything, but examples like McCormick show that it works and that doing the right thing will help the issue.
MR: Birds before brands.
MI: Birds before brands. I’ll use that!
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