As we celebrate Earth Month, millions of birds are migrating through North America to their summer homes. Unfortunately, many of them won’t make it, as they face danger from predators, weather and a man-made threat—windows.
Because clear windows reflect the outdoors, birds don’t see them as barriers and fly into them at full speed. Some are stunned, but for others, the crashes are fatal: Up to one billion birds die each year because of window strikes.
The 2023 Earth Month theme is “Invest in Our Planet,” and Kalwall’s translucent wall systems (or facades) are an effective way for building owners to do just that and mitigate the risk of deadly bird strikes. The structural sandwich panels are translucent, letting in light while appearing to birds as a solid wall, preventing fatal strikes.
The American Bird Conservancy (ABC), a non-profit with the mission of conserving wild birds and their habitats, has created a threat factor (TF) scale for measuring the estimated collision prevention of materials. A brick wall has a TF of 1; a TF of 30 estimates a collision rate of 50 percent. The ABC rated Kalwall’s panels with a TF of 2, an exemplary score.
The prismatic fibers in Kalwall’s fiberglass-reinforced polymer panels refract and scatter visible light waves in perfect Lambertian diffusion, meaning that light penetrates much deeper and more evenly into interiors.
At the same time, the translucent panels provide a barrier with almost no reflection, so they don’t entice birds, providing a window solution that is both humane and ecologically positive.