A rare bird was spotted in Ottawa for the very first time. Then it hit a window

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A rare western tanager, the first ever recorded in the City of Ottawa, wowed birders and nature lovers who followed it as it spent the winter in McCarthy Woods in Hunt Club.

The wayward tanager, which breeds in Canada in B.C., Alberta and parts of Saskatchewan, would normally spend its winters in Mexico and Central America. But with the help of volunteers, it thrived in its snowy winter home here in the capital.

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That is, until the first week of spring.

The Visitor

They called him Sunny.

“He was such a bright yellow. We don’t have many yellow birds here in the winter,” said Janette Niwa of Safe Wings Ottawa.

A resident who lived near the west end of McCarthy Woods near Hunt Club and Riverside first noticed the unusual yellow bird in late November. Soon, alerts went out on e-bird and i-naturalist, two well-known online databases and social network apps. Birders flocked to the woodlot for a glimpse of the rare visitor.

“It was pretty popular in the birding world,” Niwa said. “They had people coming in from Quebec. They had people taking road trips to see it. Definitely it was a very big thing.”

Rare bird sightings can set off a frenzy. Enter Aaron Hywarren, a “rare bird ambassador” with the Ontario Field Ornithologists, who helped protect the bird and guard the privacy of homeowners, wary of birders with spotter scopes and telephoto lenses lurking around their property.

At first, Hywarren checked on the bird’s well-being and liaised with neighbours. When January came and interest ramped up from birders looking to add the tanager to their annual list, Hywarren stepped up his game. He set up feeders in the woods to lure Sunny deeper into the trees and away from homes.

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During cold snaps he visited Sunny daily, monitoring the bird’s health and ensuring the feeders were stocked.

Though the winter was unusually mild, there were still brutal cold snaps for a bird that normally winters in Mexico or Central America.

“It worked really well,” he said. “The bird settled in on the feeders. Folks didn’t have to go close to backyards and the neighbours.” 

Most importantly, Sunny was thriving, Hywarrend said. “It’s because of folks spending time, maintaining the feeders. Donating food. Donating their time.”

‘Rest in peace you little ray of sunshine’

Alas, Sunny’s untimely end was not a result of the cold, but rather that nemesis for birds everywhere: Glass.

On March 23, Sunny struck a window at the house of the very people who first spotted him four months before.

“This little Tanager left a lasting impression with some of his antics, fending off his favourite Suet (which I like to call Aaron’s Berry mix) from woodpeckers and giving you that spunky stare when you were refilling the feeders but it wasn’t fast enough for his liking,” wrote one admirer in an April 4th Facebook post announcing Sunny’s demise.

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“Rest in peace you little ray of sunshine.”

Hywarren posted a more official death notice a few hours later, noting that some 600 people had managed to see the bird. He thanked the neighbours and volunteers who had worked hard to try to ensure the bird’s survival. Sunny, he noted, had been donated to the Royal Ontario Museum’s collection.

“My big fear was not a window strike. In fact, it was probably No. 3 on my list of worries,” Hywarren said. “No. 1 was making it through the winter. No. 2 was predators. It was a bright yellow and black bird against a very drab Ottawa winter background and it stuck out like a sore thumb.”

Twice, Hywarren watched Sunny evade a swooping hawk. There were also cats prowling the woods, an enormous risk to birds.

The homeowners who found Sunny were saddened by the death, Hywarren said. They declined to be interviewed for this story,

“It’s upsetting to find a dead bird. It doesn’t matter if it’s a crow or a pigeon or something beautiful like this. I know pretty much everyone who learned of the bird’s passing was upset. Such a wonderful, brightly coloured visitor shows up, makes it through the winter….”

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The Threat

Safe Wings Ottawa estimates more than 250,000 birds are killed in Ottawa each year by window strikes — an estimate based on one bird strike death per year per residence. Nationally, it’s estimated that anywhere from 16 million to 42 million birds die each year in window strikes in Canada.

“Birds don’t understand windows at all,” Niwa said. “There’s just no natural equivalent of a vertical transparent or reflective thing like a window. They see whatever is on the other side of it. If you have a walkway with windows on either side, they see the trees on the other side. If it’s reflective, they see the trees that are reflected.”

Surprisingly, it is residences and low-rise buildings that account for most bird collisions. A 2014 Audobon study in New York found residences three storeys or less accounted for 44 per cent of fatal bird strikes, buildings of 4-11 storeys accounted for 56 per cent, and high rises of 12 storeys or more claimed less than one per cent.

The reason is that there are significantly more houses in the city than tall buildings. And birds spend most of their time flying close to the ground.

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“Most people don’t realize or they don’t accept that their house windows are a danger for birds,” Niwa said.

“During COVID, the number of calls we got for bird collisions jumped up massively,” she said. “People were so upset and said ‘This is the first time it’s ever happened.’ The reality is that people were at home more and it was really just the first time they’d noticed it.”

That’s not to say glass-clad towers aren’t a problem. Niwa sites Centennial Towers at 200 Kent St., home to the Tax Court and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, as a major offender.

“That is our nemesis. From our monitoring, that is the worst building in Ottawa. Our estimates is that the building kills 7,000 birds annually,” she said.

The Solution

The gold standard for limiting window strikes is to install an array of decals that disrupt the reflection and that birds can see. The decals have to be closely spaced — Feather Friendly, one manufacturer of the decals — recommends spacing no more than five cm apart. And they have to be applied to the outside of the glass to break up the reflection.

Niwa cites the windows at the remodelled National Arts Centre as a good intentioned, but ineffective treatment. The designer put the decals on the inside surface.

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“The NAC was very forward thinking and they requested that whatever was built be bird-friendly. But Ottawa, at the time, didn’t have standards so they modified it to make it look prettier. And that’s one of the places where we find a lot of dead birds,” she said.

But she had praise for the National Capital Commission.

“The NCC have been an amazing supporter and partner with Safe Wings. They were one of the earliest organizations that started treating their buildings, even before Ottawa had standards in place.”

The STEM building at uOttawa is another building that is bird-friendly, using UV-coated glass to reduce the reflection.

The City of Ottawa adopted its own bird-safe design guidelines in 2020. It recommends where and how windows should be treated, suggests how to avoid bird “traps” and offers advice on exterior lighting to avoid attracting birds.

“The problem is that they are just guidelines. No developer has to follow them,” Niwa said. “For any construction company that’s running behind time or behind budget, the first thing that’s going to slide is anything that’s just a guideline. They’re the first things to go and the last things to be added.”

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She’s hopeful that the city’s new high-performance building standard will add more teeth to regulations for bird-proof buildings.

What you can do

Feather Friendly tape is effective, but expensive. A 30-metre roll costs about $25 and covers 1.5 square metres of window. A cheaper solution for do-it-yourselfers is to tie lengths of cord to a dowel that can be hung across the top of the window frame so the cord dangles down over the glass. You can also use markers on the exterior surface, although the effect won’t be permanent.

Stickers in the outline of a hawk and the popular plastic owls don’t work, Niwa said.

“The owl is not moving. It’s not a threat. I put out an owl to scare the squirrels away from my porch and they just ignore it.”

Window screens also break up the reflection and can act as a little safety cushion for birds that do fly into them.

Other simple measures: Turn off the room lights at night if the light’s not needed. Birds migrate at night and are attracted to light. Move plants away from windows: A bird will see the greenery through the window and fly to it if threatened. Move bird feeders close to the window, a metre away or less. It makes for better viewing and a startled bird who flies into the glass won’t have picked up enough speed to be injured (although a feeder near the house also risks attracting mice and rats to your house.)

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The spring and fall migrations are especially risky times for window strikes, she said.

“Sunny is a really sad story,” she said. “Everyone loved this bird. But he draws attention to the fact it is important to treat your windows. Even if you have only one area that you can reach and treat, that’s better than having no areas treated.”

Would window treatments have saved Sunny? Hywarren isn’t sure. He suspects the tanager was being pursued by a predator when it hit the window.

“There were 81 dwellings nearby. How can you possibly treat all those windows?” he said. “Would window dressing have helped? Maybe. Who knows?”

Hywarren prefers to dwell on the positives.

“It’s unfortunate that the bird succumbed in this way, but several hundred people got to enjoy the bird. It was photographed. One person even painted it. It brought so much happiness to folks.”

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