Bird-Friendly Campus

This artwork helps save birds

SUNY ESF is helping to do our part to protect birds by using artful treatments on glass surfaces on our campus to prevent fatal bird building collisions. Every year over 1 billion birds die in the United States after colliding with windows and other glassy surfaces. Most victims are songbirds who momentarily mistake glass reflections for habitat.

Simple, effective solutions are available, like the ones you see around the Syracuse campus. Patterns applied to glass creates “visual noise” that alert birds to the presence of a solid surface and can reduce building strikes by at least 90%.

SUNY ESF began treating glass windscreens on the Syracuse campus in 2025, to make our campus more bird friendly. Then, in 2026 we adopted a bird-friendly action item in the ESF Sustainability Action Plan requiring all new buildings and retrofits on campus to incorporate bird-friendly building design (SAP Action Item 15.5). This puts SUNY ESF in league with other universities and colleges like Yale University and the University of Pennsylvania that have committed to making their campuses safe for birds.

Efforts to make SUNY ESF more bird friendly are a collaboration between the Office of Sustainability, the Division of Sustainable Facilities & Operations, the Guy Baldassarre Birding Club, and other community members. From 2024 to 2025, advocacy, pilot-test mitigation, and data collection projects on campus were led by two ESF students: Meredith Barges (PhD, exp ‘27) and Emily McClary (BS, ‘28).

Like What You See?

An initial “Make ESF More Bird Friendly” pilot project was launched in spring 2025 to treat several glass surfaces on SUNY ESF’s Syracuse campus. Student artist and environmental illustrator Katie Mulligan (MFA, ’26), of Syracuse University, teamed up with ESF students Meredith and Emily to apply temporary bird strike mitigation murals to many freestanding glass panels on campus. Five large “mitigation murals” were created featuring local flora and fauna, like the American Woodcock and Mourning Dove. These murals were located on exterior glass panels near Jahn Lab, Baker Lab, and the Gateway Center. 

ADD PHOTOS

 

The ESF Office of Communications and Marketing digitized the bird-friendly art during the spring of 2026, and permanent treatments were installed prior to the heart of the 2026 bird migration season. 

Found an injured or dead bird on campus?

Log a report on the SUNY ESF Community Bird Collision Project