Residents urged to help rescue bird window-collision survivors in Markham

Join FLAP Canada bird rescue patrol to save migratory songbirds moving to the south

Yorkregion.com
Oct. 11, 2022
Irene Wong

It is heartbreaking to see two white-throated sparrows killed by windows in Markham in the morning.

As summer makes way for autumn, strong north winds overnight have fuelled a massive movement of migratory songbirds on the way to their southern wintering grounds.

However, many of these tiny travellers, weighing no more than a dozen grams each, are stranded by dangers such as reflective and transparent windows in the urban environment.

Collisions with buildings are one of the most significant sources of human-caused mortality for birds, killing around 25 million birds in Canada every year.

FLAP Canada bird rescue volunteers are on an urgent search-and-rescue mission in the Greater Toronto Area to locate survivors and rush them to wildlife rehabilitation facilities to receive medical care. They have already found dozens of birds of many different species and continue to find more as the morning progresses.

Volunteers are calling for a bird rescue patrol. You can contact Michael Mesure, executive director of FLAP Canada, by phone 905-649-9223 or 416-366-3527 or email flap@flap.org.

FLAP Canada is working to safeguard migratory birds in the built environment through education, policy development, research, rescue and rehabilitation.

FLAP provides resources on what to do when you find a dead or injured bird. The first thing you can do is help FLAP track bird window collisions by entering the incident in their FLAP Mapper -- this tool is used as an international bird collision database to understand where these collisions are happening and what can be done to prevent them.

Visit flap.org for more information.