Migratory birds face an accumulation of welfare hazards along their flyways — from glass collisions to light pollution — that cause mass mortality and suffering annually.
Migratory bird welfare spans multiple countries, habitats, and hazard types that require coordinated international responses. Individual welfare harms — window collision injury, exhaustion from artificial light disorientation, trapping, and lead poisoning — aggregate into mortality of hundreds of millions of birds annually. Many of these harms are preventable: window treatments, lights-out programs during migration, lead ammunition replacement, and enforcement of illegal trapping bans. Consumer actions — window markers, supporting lights-out programs, and non-lead ammunition advocacy — scale into meaningful welfare improvement when adopted across millions of households and hunting licenses.