Empty Branches Project Interview #1: Bird Protection in the Cities with FLAP founder Michael Mesure
In 2024, my company Blue Ceiling dance, will be celebrating 20 years. We have lots of celebratory activities planned from the fall of 2023 through to end of 2024, and the biggest celebration will be our production of “empty branches” in early fall 2024. (Generously supported by a 3-year long-term project grant from the Toronto Arts Council as well as creation support from Canada Council for the Arts.)
"empty branches" is a four-part dance that uses the title image as an entry point to explore quantum fluctuations, regenerative neuroscience, the dynamics of forests and threats to migratory birds. Part of our creative process includes working with experts in these fields: interviews, workplace visits, and rehearsal visits. While we’re dealing with science, we’re focusing on the very human passions that fuel the science, ignite the dance and illuminate our interconnectivity with all sizes, shapes and timescales of life on Earth.
In light of our curiosities as we continue to develop “empty branches", I’m relaunching the Art-Science events and interviews (which originated in 2017), as a reminder that both science and art are really about describing, in the most personal ways, the nature of reality and our experience of it, while also stepping into never-ending, unknown territory.
Here is the first in the new wave of the Art-Science Intersection interview series: Michael Mesure, Founder and Executive Director of FLAP Canada.
FLAP (Fatal Light Awareness Program) Canada is a registered Canadian charity widely recognized as the pre-eminent authority on the bird-building collision issue.
Each year in Canada, around 25 million migratory birds die as a direct result of collisions with buildings. We can only expect that number to grow unless we all work together to help mitigate local biodiversity loss through urban development that considers wildlife species.
For almost 30 years, FLAP Canada has engaged millions of people with dozens of campaigns and initiatives with one goal: keep birds safe from deadly collisions with buildings.
(from the FLAP Canada website)
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LUCY: It is so lovely to meet you Michael, if virtually, and thank you so much for your willingness to speak with me! I’m working on a dance creation right now that gets into the threats to migratory birds. Mark Peck, from the Royal Ontario Museum is our ornithology consultant and in our first meeting with him he spoke to us about FLAP, as he showed us some of the bird specimens in the archives at the museum.
Now I remember when I first moved to Toronto in 1996 there was a lot of buzz about FLAP.
MICHAEL: Yes, that would have been near our beginning. We started in 1993, but in 1996 we ended up in a partnership with the World Wildlife Fund of Canada which really brought our message to the forefront.
LUCY: I’m a lifelong birdwatcher, quite literally my parents started taking me to spring migration at Point Pelee National Park when I was a baby. My sister is also a birding expert and works at Point Pelee. So when I heard about FLAP, I started going out and looking for birds that had hit buildings. I remember the first bird I saw was a black-throated green warbler, dead on the sidewalk near Bay and Bloor in downtown Toronto. It was very jarring to me because up until then I had only looked for and seen warblers in woodlands and savannahs and occasionally in my back yard, not in the concrete centre of the city.
MICHAEL: It’s always a bit of a surprise to people.
LUCY: But once you know, it obvious what a ridiculous blind spot we have.
How did you come to bee one of the co-founders, and now the executive director, of FLAP?
MICHAEL: Kind of like yourself, I’ve always had a fascination with birds. I grew up in Thornhill in a beautiful home that backed onto the ravine, and the Thornhill Golf and Country club. So, I always had access to wildlife, mostly birds.
My original background is in the arts. I owned and operated a couple of art galleries. I tried to sustain a living through selling my artwork. It’s extremely challenging to try to survive in that world. It’s also not easy to survive in the not-for-profit sector which I’m in now, but….
According to my parents, the first things I ever drew, and could not stop drawing, were birds. It was just an intrinsic part of me from day one.
In 1989, a friend of mine told me about a conversation he had with a teaching colleague. During their conversation this teacher had a box, with fluttering inside it. When my friend inquired about it the teacher said, “Oh, I find these birds on the sidewalks in Toronto. I go down before daybreak, I pick them up and bring them to show to the students. Then we release them in the ravine by the school.”
When my friend told me this I thought “What are you talking about? How is this possible?” So, my friend and I went downtown before daybreak and came out a door and first thing we saw was a bird in front of a car, then one down the street. Then more and more. I just couldn’t believe this was happening.
 Read Michael’s “Bird Zero” story here. |
I found myself going downtown more and more often and the while trying to build my business which was located an hour and half drive out of Toronto.
I was getting sick, running a business all day and sometimes into the night, then getting up at 2 or 3 in the morning to drive into the city to look for birds. I just physically couldn’t handle it. I had to choose, and I chose the birds.
People started hearing about me and about the issue and a small core group formed. That was a game changer, one of the strongest influencing factors for doing this as a career. Every once in a while in our lives there are these signs that are sent out to us and it’s a matter of whether you’re prepared to listen or not. I listened, I couldn’t help but listen. It brought me to where I am today. This small core group founded FLAP.
LUCY: Now I’m going to be wracking my brain thinking: “What didn’t I listen to?” There are probably some big things I didn’t couldn't hear!
MICHAEL: Hey, me too. I’m sure there have been plenty of things that landed right in front of me and just didn’t click. But it was a really important lesson to learn – we all need to learn – we need to listen and really pay attention. These things can be game changers. I’m proud to say that FLAP has changed the world. Not just Toronto, or Canada, but it’s changed things around the world.
LUCY: That philosophy seems embedded in your organization. FLAP encourages people to pay attention to the world around them. People hear about FLAP and then they start to pay attention, they notice new details in their surroundings, and I’m sure they start thinking: how did I not see this before?
When my husband and I first started dating, we were walking through High Park and I pointed out an oriole and a red-tailed hawk and he said “I’ve walked through this park my whole life and I’ve never paid attention to these things.” And now he notices everything. This morning he spent at least 10 minutes watching squirrel behaviour in our back yard.
On the subject of noticing more....let's talk about the FLAP art installation projects that have happened at the ROM and Nathan Phillips Square. You lay out all the birds you've collected throughout a spring migratory and people can see the actual numbers of a spring collection?
MICHAEL: The sheer volume of birds that we continued to pick up was the inspiration for this project. When you start to get so many birds, it feels like a missed opportunity if we don’t use the bodies as a way to send a message. It’s not a strong arm, aggressive approach. It’s more like “come join, take a look, leave if you must but…”
It evolved.
In 2001 National Geographic did an article on this issue and they sent a photographer from Washington to take a photo of our layout – we had 5000 birds. This installation happened at Nathan Philips Square, not at the ROM. So the photographer came with a tripod and he thought he was going to sit this tripod down with the camera on it and take the shots. He was blown away. He had to go onto the second story balcony in Nathan Philips Square to get all the birds in the shot.
It went into the magazine as a double page spread. According to the editor of National Geographic at the time, they started getting complaints from Toyota, one of their major advertisers. They were angry that they weren’t informed this image would be in the magazine because they wanted the adjacent page. They knew people would be flipping back to that image because it was so powerful.
That was very telling of how these displays of the bird bodies that could grab people’s attention. So we keep doing it, every year.
LUCY: What are the major challenges you face through your work at FLAP?
MICHAEL: In the mid 90s we focused on bird-building collisions: light-induced collisions, lit structures at night. There was such a strong swell of support, interest, and fascination in this issue through the campaigns we did that it became entrenched in people’s minds that the problem was bright lights at night in the city of Toronto.
But we very quickly learned when we continued monitoring bird migration after sunrise into the morning, there was a whole other wave of birds. The daytime issue was an even bigger problem than the nighttime issue.
The big problem now is that people think if they turn the lights off at night it will address the issue. Even though most people have experienced bird collisions at their homes, their cottages, their workplaces, they are familiar with it, but they don’t understand the magnitude. The one bird that hit their window – it’s unfortunate, but they don’t realize that every home on their street, every home in their neighbourhood every building in their city is experiencing the exact same thing.
LUCY: That’s a lot of birds.
MICHAEL: There’s a minds-eye perspective that creates an obstacle, especially with commercial buildings: that it’s going to cost too much to rectify the problem and interfere with the beauty of the building. By suggesting putting markers on their windows people think we are asking them to compromise the architectural integrity of their building. These are the primary obstacles we have faced and continue to face.
The good news is that we can very quickly demonstrate that the cost is marginal, when you are dealing with a new building, and the aesthetics are quite beautiful. With the City of Toronto now having mandatory bird safety requirements in place for new buildings, the architects that once resisted are now embracing not so much because they have to, but because it’s a whole new aesthetic to explore.
LUCY: That makes me think about the theory of creativity that constraints in an artistic process can inspire more innovation.
MICHAEL: Exactly. Architects and developers are realizing that it’s the right thing to do and that it can actually be a rewarding experience.
LUCY: Is the work you do with guidelines and building bylaws and policies getting easier?
MICHAEL: It is, yes. But here’s the thing. It’s a piecemeal process. Municipality by municipality. Compared to the rate of bird decline…it’s not fast enough. A number of things have changed that are increasing the potential for this to be a more widespread approach. The law that’s now in place for the province…
LUCY: I don’t think I know about this law.
MICHAEL: It’s another a game changer.
Believe it or not it is now illegal to harm or kill a migratory bird in the province of Ontario as a result of a collision with a window. This came about in the second of two precedent-setting laws suits in 2010 and 2013. I sat as a key witness in both of those trials. In the second trial the judge piggybacked on a section of existing law in the Environmental Protection Act where anyone who emits a contaminant that harms or kills a bird can be held accountable unto the law if they don’t take action to mitigate that problem.
That’s wonderful news, but the problem was the ministry wanted nothing to do with enforcing this law. The way it’s written, everybody is breaking this law.
We had to walk them through the process and explain that it’s more about those isolated buildings that are killing large amounts of birds and that have the means to mitigate the problem but refuse to. That shrunk down the volume of structures to which the law would be applied and enforced.
So within the province of Ontario it is illegal to harm or kill a migratory bird. Federally it’s illegal to harm an at-risk migratory species of bird. A voluntary approach to this was never going to be resolved. The ministry is enforcing this on a piecemeal approach by individual complaints. The ministry hired the Canadian Standards Association to write a standard for the province and for any municipality looking to introduce mandatory requirements into their community to address the concern of bird collisions. This standard is available but voluntary.
What we’re doing is we’re trying to get the provincial building code to adopt this standard. If we’re successful, then all municipalities will have to do what Toronto is doing. With these guidelines in place new buildings will have to include these standards in their design.
LUCY: That’s fascinating. It runs in line with ideas surrounding social and political change right now: that you have to change the laws first, then change the rules and then it will filter down to change the culture.
MICHAEL: It takes a while.
LUCY: You need brave people who are willing to change the laws first, when it’s not widely supported, and who can deal with the push back. That’s hard.
MICHAEL: I was impressed by ecoGenesis -- the legal team behind bringing this case in court. They had experts that were able to testify on the stand demonstrating that once daylight reflects off a surface, namely glass, it is reflected in the form of radiation. And on the list of public contaminants is….
LUCY: Radiation…
MICHAEL: Yes. That’s how it came to be law for the province.
LUCY: Brilliant.
MICHAEL: We’re really hoping that the building code will embrace this. It will change the landscape entirely.
LUCY: That’s the way in for many different problems for species at risk and habitat at risk.
MICHAEL: We have no choice. You have to make law and you have to enforce law. Bless people’s hearts, there’s a lot of people with all the best intentions, but they don’t always do something about it.
LUCY: And the people with the best intentions are not always the ones with the power to make the systemic changes.
MICHAEL: Yes.
LUCY: Have you seen any changes in the species of birds that are being found? Has that shifted a lot?
MICHAEL: When I started in 1989 the volume of birds I was encountering was far greater than those that are being encountered by the volunteers now. Now we have far more people out looking for birds and we’re still finding about the same number of birds, which means that we’re looking at a decline in the overall number of birds.
That said, it’s not about the volume but the kinds of species. Which ones are most vulnerable? This year we picked up 177 different species. 27 were at-risk species. Some of them weren’t at-risk when we first started. More and more species are on the at-risk list.
LUCY: When you say species at risk, are you talking about the provincial list? Or a more general sense of “at risk” for the species?
MICHAEL: There’s an Ontario species-at-risk list, and a federal species-at-risk category. Ontario’s list is more often than not the list we refer to. But we now have FLAP groups all over the country and North America
LUCY: I was recently comparing the federal and provincial lists. And I found it puzzling to see which species are on both lists, which are on one or the other. A species may be “at-risk” in Canada but not in specifically Ontario. Or, for instance, the barn owl is endangered in Ontario but not across Canada.
MICHAEL: This drives me crazy. If a species is showing decline, whether it’s in Ontario or British Columbia or California, it is demonstrating that it is vulnerable in general and it shouldn’t be dealt with in a piecemeal way.
LUCY: It’s confusing conceptually. A bird in Ontario can’t just fly to British Columbia because the habitat is healthier there. Maybe the wider approach is for communities to pay attention to their local populations. That conceptually feels more meaningful and less prone to misunderstanding.
Oh, did I hear a red-bellied woodpecker calling at your place?
MICHAEL: Yes. And the other day we had a red-headed woodpecker here. This is an endangered species now.
LUCY: As a kid I saw red-headed woodpeckers all the time, never really bothered to pay attention. When I was birding the spring migration at Point Pelee this year I saw so many, pairs flying in off the lake together and landing in low branches of new trees. This is when it dawned on me I hadn't seen one in years.
MICHAEL: They are beautiful.
LUCY: They really are. I feel like it’s been a good woodpecker year so far! I’ve seen so many species and individual birds just here in Toronto -- in High Park and my back yard. I even heard a Pileated woodpecker in High Park this year, but I didn’t see it. It was deep in the woods, way off trail.
I saw my first Pileated woodpecker in High Park a few years ago. I was terrified. It flew just over my head, landed on the trunk of a tree in front of me, and let out its maniacal laugh. I thought “What the hell kind of pterodactyl is that!? And is it going to eat me?”
I did a cosmetic retro fit to the posts in our yard, a cedar covering to support the existing posts. The day after I did it a Pileated woodpecker just destroyed one of the posts. Pecked right through the cosmetic covering I had added.
LUCY: Since Toronto was the starting place of FLAP, I’ll ask how is Toronto doing now in comparison with other city centres that are taking on this issue?
MICHAEL: Toronto is the first city in the world to address this concern. First to introduce guidelines, an educational campaign, mandatory building requirements. First to introduce a biodiversity series based on bird conservation. And for now, Toronto continues to lead the way.
Toronto is going to meet its match soon though, as areas are jumping on board, catching up and stepping over. I hope this gets Toronto’s back up competitively! There’s still a lot of work to be done. For instance, the next step for us is to get the city to introduce mandatory requirements for existing buildings because quite frankly that’s where 99.9% of the birds are dying. The requirements for new buildings are important and a great achievement but won’t get to the crux of the problem. We need a graduated direction for existing buildings.
LUCY: A lot of new builds now have to preserve or integrate older or original buildings into new plans. I like this architecturally, but it must create additional challenges or complexity with the building requirements for bird safety, among other things.
MICHAEL: Requirements for existing buildings are and will be full of compromises. We want to make it as easy as possible for buildings to comply, by meeting certain criteria. It will be impossible to get every single-family dwelling on board. Natural areas, volume of glass, these will be the concerns and considerations for existing buildings.
LUCY: What can people in those single-family dwellings do? Where I live now is the first place I’ve lived where I have not witnessed bird hits to our windows. So I wonder are there things about my house that make it safer for birds –the kind of windows we have, the directions the windows face?
MICHAEL: What you’re saying is a common observation. Where I am I have only documented one collision. But I guarantee that so many more are happening. This is what is happening with people’s homes. We’re usually not awake at the time birds tend to collided, or no one is home when the strikes happen. So many variables explain why you haven’t seen it.
LUCY: What can we do? My house is 100 years old, and we are not able to renovate any time soon.
MICHAEL: It’s all based on what you’re willing and able to do. We developed a DIY app which allows homeowners to rate the windows of their home. Around 20 questions will give you a tiered level of concern, low to moderate to high to lethal. If you have a lethal rating, work on that first and work your way down. Make adjustments as you can.
It on our birdsafe.ca website.
LUCY: I’m going to do that!
MICHAEL: It helps people decide: Where’s the best bang for my buck? Where’s my effort going to reap the best results? The good thing about it is that it’s relatively easy to resolve. You don’t have to spend a single cent, you can use things you have around the home, and there’s very affordable DIY products.
LUCY: One more question, it’s a bit of a weird one. Do we want more birds coming through the city? Or do we want to encourage them to bypass cities and finding safer ways through? Could you even do that?
MICHAEL: The birds were here before we were. They’re doing what instinct tells them to do and there’s no way to guide a bird to not fly through or end up in the city. But more importantly we need to learn how to share our built environment not just with birds but with everything living, to create an environment that welcomes these forms of wildlife in the city. We can definitely all coexist.
We’re in a lot of trouble if we lose birds. Of all the forms of wildlife, I think birds are the one form that will tip the scale. They control our insect populations; they pollinate, they distribute seeds, they feed millions of dollars into the economy through the birdwatching industry. There’s a “birdwatcher” stereotype, but if you have a bird feeder, you’re a birdwatcher. Any big box store, grocery store, corner store now you find birdseed. So many people feed birds. We all have this fascination and appreciation but not at a level yet where we’re actively protecting them.
LUCY: It’s like we’re missing a link between the two ideas.
MICHAEL: We are doing it as a way to entertain ourselves not to protect them. To keep appreciating them, to keep being entertained by them, we have to start protecting.
LUCY: Michael, you have given me so much of your time, I really appreciate it. I’m off to do my window assessments now….
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Visit flap.org to find out more about bird-building collision proofing your home, getting involved with FLAP activities or donating to the cause.
For bird-proofing kits and supplies visit Feather Friendly.
Want to start birding or understand more about the birds in your area? Try Ontario Field Ornithologists or the Feminist Bird Club or the Toronto Ornithological Club or google search "ornithological clubs" in your area.
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Stay tuned for our next "empty branches" interview....who will it be?
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