I am now five days into what I thought would be a one day project. If it was just a matter of the time needed to complete all of the work, I might have finished everything in a day, maybe a day and a half. But because it is an undertaking that requires full concentration while performing a repetitive task, I thought it best to break the work down into one-hour blocks. Any more than an hour, I found myself getting sloppy. The job is putting hundreds of reflective dots on all of my north-facing and south-facing windows. East and west don’t seem to be an issue. 

Two weeks ago I asked Craig Thompson, Department of Natural Resources biologist and local bird expert, whether he had heard that more birds than normal were smashing into the windows of people’s houses. He said that he hadn’t.

“I’ve even put falcon silhouettes and reflective leaves on my windows,” I said, “and the birds are still hitting the glass. In the past, it was two or three birds a year, but there have been that many hits in just the past month.”

“Yeah,” Craig said. “Unless you practically cover your windows with silhouettes or reflective leaves, they don’t work. The birds think that they can just go around them. The only thing that really works is dots over the entire window. If the dots are only a couple inches apart, the birds won’t try to sneak through. I have a bunch of dots at home if you want some.”

I accepted Craig’s offer, and a few days later he dropped off a dozen small packages at my house. I had assumed that the dots would come on broad sheets of paper, similar to a roll of wax paper, but they did not. Instead they came in narrow strips only one dot wide. My first thought was that applying the dots to the windows would be a lot of work. Now, after a week of washing windows, climbing ladders, and repeatedly unrolling strips of reflective dots, I can confirm that my initial assessment of the workload was correct.

So far I’ve only done the windows on the south side. There are five windows there, and each window needed thirteen vertical rows of dots. Thirteen rows times five windows meant at least sixty-five trips up an extension ladder, and if I include the times I forgot a tool, dropped a tool, or made some other small error while five feet off the ground, I am sure that I went up and down my ladder a hundred times in the past week. And I’m only half done!

A cruel, but effective way to gauge how much I appreciate a certain species of bird is to find a dead one just outside my picture window. A dead starling hardly bothers me at all; it is, after all, an invasive species. A dead mourning dove saddens me, but only for as long as it takes me to carry it to the trash. A dead ruby-throated hummingbird makes me ill for days, and the first brown creeper I ever saw in La Crosse was a dead one on my front porch. Its death is what led me to try the falcon silhouettes.

I hope the dots on my windows keep away all of the birds.

Steven Simpson