Building a Bird-Friendly Yale, With Campus as a Living Lab

On a brisk October morning last fall, Viveca Morris and Kristof Zyskowski were canvassing Yale’s campus in search of “bird strikes”—songbirds killed after colliding with glass windows. After a few minutes, they found a casualty: a ruby-crowned kinglet, so named for its bright orange crest. The research is part of the Yale Bird-Friendly Building Initiative, a collaboration between the Law, Ethics & Animals Program at Yale Law School (where Morris is Executive Director), the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, the Yale Office of Sustainability, the Yale Office of Facilities, and the American Bird Conservancy.

With support from a seed grant from the Yale Planetary Solutions Project, the Initiative is conducting two research projects in the 2022–2023 academic year, drawing on the expertise of Yale faculty and staff across multiple departments and disciplines and using the campus as a living laboratory to advance biodiversity protection and research.

The second part of the Yale Bird-Friendly Building Initiative’s research focuses on investigating the experiences of cities that have passed bird-friendly laws in order to help more cities do the same. With Morris, Yale Divinity School student Meredith Barges is researching existing bird-friendly building policies in five U.S. cities.