Billions of wild birds are killed annually by preventable human-caused hazards including window strikes, cat predation, and pesticide poisoning. Simple interventions save enormous numbers of lives.
Wild bird welfare in human-dominated landscapes involves a tragic scale of preventable suffering and death. Window strikes cause acute trauma — concussive brain injury, skeletal fractures, and internal hemorrhage — in billions of birds who cannot perceive glass as a barrier. Cat predation causes both direct mortality and chronic stress through predation pressure in areas where cats hunt. The welfare response to these harms is straightforward: most interventions are low-cost and high-impact. Window decals or films eliminate the vast majority of strike mortality at treated buildings. Keeping cats indoors or in secure enclosures eliminates cat predation impacts entirely. Reducing pesticide use and switching to wildlife-compatible pest management practices reduces poisoning. These individual actions aggregate to population-level welfare benefits when adopted at scale — urban buildings, homeowners, and businesses can collectively prevent enormous numbers of bird deaths and injuries.