Opening the black box of bird-window collisions: passive video recordings in a residential backyard.

Collisions with windows on buildings are a major source of bird mortality. The current understanding of daytime collisions is limited by a lack of empirical data on how collisions occur in the real world because most data are collected by recording evidence of mortality rather than pre-collision behaviour. Based on published literature suggesting a causal relationship between bird collision risk and the appearance of reflections on glass, the fact that reflections vary in appearance depending on viewing angle, and general principles of object collision kinematics, we hypothesized that the risk and lethality of window collisions may be related to the angle and velocity of birds' flight. We deployed a home security camera system to passively record interactions between common North American bird species and residential windows in a backyard setting over spring, summer and fall seasons over 2 years. We captured 38 events including 29 collisions and nine near-misses in which birds approached the glass but avoided impact. Only two of the collisions resulted in immediate fatality, while 23 birds flew away immediately following impact. Birds approached the glass at variable flight speeds and from a wide range of angles, suggesting that the dynamic appearance of reflections on glass at different times of day may play a causal role in collision risk. Birds that approached the window at higher velocity were more likely to be immediately killed or stunned. Most collisions were not detected by the building occupants and, given that most birds flew away immediately, carcass surveys would only document a small fraction of window collisions. We discuss the implications of characterizing pre-collision behaviour for designing effective collision prevention methods.

European starlings (sturnus vulgaris) discriminate rhythms by rate, not temporal patterns.

Humans can perceive a regular psychological pulse in music known as the beat. The evolutionary origins and neural mechanisms underlying this ability are hypothetically linked to imitative vocal learning, a rare trait found only in some species of mammals and birds. Beat perception has been demonstrated in vocal learning parrots but not in songbirds. We trained European starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) on two sound discriminations to investigate their perception of the beat and temporal structure in rhythmic patterns. First, we trained birds on a two-choice discrimination between rhythmic patterns of tones that contain or lack a regular beat. Despite receiving extensive feedback, the starlings were unable to distinguish the first two patterns. Next, we probed the temporal cues that starlings use for discriminating rhythms in general. We trained birds to discriminate a baseline set of isochronous and triplet tone sequences. On occasional probe trials, we presented transformations of the baseline patterns. The starlings' responses to the probes suggest they relied on absolute temporal features to sort the sounds into "fast" and "slow" and otherwise ignored patterns that were present. Our results support that starlings attend to local features in rhythms and are less sensitive to the global temporal organization.