Woodcocks have the brightest white feathers ever measured

Peer-Reviewed Publication

IMPERIAL COLLEGE LONDON

 

IMAGE: WOODCOCK IN FLIGHT view more 

CREDIT: JEAN-LOU ZIMMERMANN

The mainly brown woodcock uses its bright white tail feathers to communicate in semi-darkness, reflecting 30% more light than any other known bird.

These surprise findings, by a team led by an Imperial College London scientist, suggest there is much to learn about how birds that are most active at night or at dawn and dusk communicate.

Birds that are most active during the day often have colourful plumages, which they use to communicate information with each other. Birds that are most active at dawn and dusk or at night (‘crepuscular’), such as nightjars and woodcocks, tend to have less showy plumage, as while sleeping during the day they need to be camouflaged to avoid predators.

Rather than using showy plumages, it was thought that birds active during low light conditions instead used sounds or chemicals to communicate. However, many have bright white patches, which could be used in environments with very little natural light for communication if these are reflective enough.

The Eurasian woodcock, Scolopax rusticola, is primarily mottled brown, but has patches of white feathers on the underside of its tail. This means it only shows these patches when raising its tail or during courtship display flights.

However, as they are crepuscular, and so most active during low light, these white patches need to reflect as much light as possible to attract attention. To investigate how they might do this, the team studied the white tail feathers of Eurasian woodcock specimens from a collection in Switzerland.

They used specialised microscopy to image feather structure, spectrophotometry to measure the light reflectance, and models to characterise how photons of light interact with structures inside the feather. They were surprised to find the reflectance measurements showed the feathers reflected up to 55% of light – 30% more light than any other measured feather. The results are published today in Royal Society Interface.

Lead researcher Jamie Dunning, from the Department of Life Sciences (Silwood Park) at Imperial, said: “Bird enthusiasts have long known that woodcocks have these intense white patches, but just how white they are and how they function has remained a mystery. From an ecological perspective the intensity of the reflectance from these feathers makes sense – they need to hoover up all the light available in a very dimly lit environment, under the woodland canopy at night.”

Individual feathers are made of a central stem with protrusions called rami forming the bulk of the structure. The rami are held together by round Velcro-like ‘barbules’.

The team found that in the woodcock’s white tail feathers the rami are thickened and flattened, which both increases the surface area for light to bounce off, while also making it less likely light will pass between the feather barbs without being reflected.

There are two main ways surfaces are reflective. ‘Specular’ reflection is when light bounces off a smooth surface, like a mirror. ‘Diffuse’ reflectance scatters light rays in different directions. The thickened rami were found to be made up of a network of keratin nanofibers and scattered air pockets. This creates lots of interfaces that can scatter light, increasing the feathers’ diffuse reflectance.

Analysis of the feathers showed one final trick up the woodcock’s sleeve: the rami and barbules in the white woodcock feathers are arranged to create a venetian-blind-like effect that further enhances the surface area, by sitting at the optimum angle for light reflectance.

Principal Curator of Birds at the Natural History Museum Dr Alex Bond said: “This research is a brilliant combination of using museum specimens and cutting-edge tools to try and understand this phenomenon. Being able to see whether closely related species or species with similar ecology also had these incredibly white feathers was a key bit of figuring out the story.”

Optical microscopy image of the white tail region

SEM image fo the white feather tips

CREDIT

Liliana D’Alba

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JOURNAL

Journal of The Royal Society Interface

DOI

10.1098/rsif.2022.0920 

ARTICLE TITLE

How woodcocks produce the most brilliant white plumage patches among the birds,

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

1-Mar-2023

Anarchy, Freedom, Native People & The Environment

GEORGE WOODCOCK

Interview by Alvin Finkel

Article originally published Fall 1990

George Woodcock is a Canadian treasure. Author of innumerable books and articles on subjects ranging from Canadian literature to Gandhi to the native peoples of British Columbia, Woodcock is always lucid and generally controversial. An opponent of systems of external authority both capitalist and communist, Woodcock's many works champion human desires for autonomy and for community. In this interview, he shares his insights on the possibilities of creating genuine freedom in complex modern societies. Mr. Woodcock, 78, has just finished writing a book on the history of British Columbia, and now is “between things”—doing a little poetry, a little translation. Winner of the Governor General's Award, he lives in Vancouver where he is contemplating his next book.

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Aurora: You've published a great deal on anarchist theory and traditions. Are there lessons in this body of work for industrial societies, or have we passed the state where there are opportunities for organizing society without the overwhelming influence of state and corporate bureaucracies?

Woodcock: I think anarchism and its teachings of decentralization, of the co-ordination of rural and industrial societies, and of mutual aid as the foundation of any viable societies, have lessons that in the present are especially applicable to industrial societies.

The anarchists, unlike William Morris and John Ruskin, have never stood in opposition to industrialization. Indeed, as many modern sociologists recognize, the best-known anarchist theoretician, Peter Kropotkin, particularly in Mutual Aid and Fields, Factories and Workshops, was a pioneer in sketching out ways in which an industrial society could be humanized through the efficient use of new techniques.

Surely recent events have demonstrated very clearly the failure of state and corporate bureaucracies in organizing modern societies. State bureaucracies throughout the Communist world have shown the total inadequacy of centralized governmental production and distribution to provide for the needs of populations. In all these countries the recent relaxation of centralized state bureaucracies has demonstrated the extraordinary resilience of individual and co-operative as opposed to state-regulated enterprise.

I was in China three years ago to see the extraordinary revitalization of the economy as the peasants once again took control of the products of their fields and as small co-operatives began to operate local industries and even coal mines. Almost overnight, stubborn problems of consumption were solved by the willing and spontaneous activities of farmers and artisans. In the streets of Chinese cities one saw great markets springing up, controlled by voluntary agreement between the peasants and merchants who went there to sell. These markets had no queues like those which formed in Moscow at the same period; sufficiency of consumer goods had been achieved in a very short time once the state and its centralizing agencies did not interfere.

Since then, everywhere in the Communist world except for Albania, the dismantling of centralized state bureaucracies has begun, because everywhere these bureaucracies have shown their total incapacity to manage either national or local economies productively. Once the control of production was put back into the hands of the producers, the natural inclination of all societies towards mutual aid and co-operation went into action again and saved the situation.

The same criticisms apply to corporate bureaucracies. It is, to begin with, disputable how much benefit such bureaucracies have ever been to society as a whole. In the interests of profit, on the one hand they increase the cost and on the other they diminish the variety of consumer goods, even on the agricultural level with such products as apples and potatoes. At the same time, they work in collaboration with labour union bureaucracies to dehumanize the conditions of work through mass production techniques; most of the improvements union bosses claim to have gained are cosmetic ones.

These two tendencies combine to reduce the quality of life for individuals, a tendency that is increased by the fact that corporate bureaucracies also pollute and destroy the environment. This is dramatically revealed these days on an international scale by sensational oil spills and by the continued devastation of the Amazon basin.

On a more local scale we see this in the series of disputes between logging companies on the one hand and environmentalists and native peoples on the other regarding the practice of “clear cutting.” In all these situations, corporate bureaucracies show themselves to be irresponsible, antisocial and, because of their size, inefficient.

In consequence, many industries are now finding a decentralized form of production more efficient than Henry Ford-style centralized mass production; this is particularly the case in the automotive industry Ford helped to create.

At the same time, experiments in centralized agricultural planning in Soviet Russia, Communist China, and smaller countries ruled on so-called “Marxist” principles have universally failed on the most important level, that of the efficient production of consumer goods. Where they have been replaced by individual peasant holdings or by small locally controlled co-operatives, the increase in productivity has been strikingly large and almost immediate.

I think that experience has shown by now that bureaucracies—whether political, corporate, or labour—are efficient in inverse proportion to the area they control; and the lesson of this experience is that if we are to better our lives and save our environments, we must move away from centralized national or corporate structures and in the direction of decentralized confederal structures allowing much greater participation of the citizen as producer, consumer, and community member.

Aurora: Many of Canada's native peoples, about whom you've written extensively, can look to a past in which complex state organizations were unnecessary. Is there much in this past that can aid them in searching for a better future?

Woodcock: I doubt if any of the Canadian native peoples can look back on a complex state organization as we envisage such organizations in the modern world, whether totalitarian or soi-disant democratic.

What we mean by the state is a rigid authoritarian hierarchy of power in which the government always has the last say in determining not only matters of collective interest but also the lives of individuals. Though structures roughly approximating this definition may have evolved in a few places in the pre-Columbian Americas (Inca Peru and less certainly Aztec Mexico) there was no time in Canada when complex state organizations existed or were considered necessary.

The Inuit and the forest Indians of northern British Columbia had virtually no political organization beyond the wandering extended family. The Coast Indians of British Columbia, who had the most complex culture north of the valley of Mexico, possessed elaborate social ranking systems but virtually no political organization.

The man whom traders or explorers saw as the chief of a village was in fact no more than primus inter pares, the head of the most prosperous lineage in the village. He had no more than a moral influence over the rival house chiefs, based not on any political system but on his ability to gather the consumer goods necessary for the celebration of prestigious potlatches or giving feasts.

The only groups among whom some kind of political organization state existed were the Plains Indians of what we generally call the Blackfoot Confederacy, and the confederation of Iroquois tribes—the Six Nations of history—who appeared first in Canada as dreaded invaders and did not settle in what is now Canadian territory until late in the eighteenth century, after the war of American Independence. In neither case did anything remotely resembling a political state emerge. In both instances there existed a loose confederacy of tribes with common interests though not always with a shared language.

In both confederacies the tribes were autonomous groupings of lineages holding certain rights and organized under a concept of chiefly authority that Europeans always found puzzling since the chief had no more than his personal prestige to sustain his dignity, and he enjoyed no form of absolute power. He really projected the authority generated by councils of elders, warrior societies, and women's societies among the Iroquois in what were essentially systems of participatory democracy, not state hierarchies.

The tribes of the Blackfoot Confederacy would usually meet each summer in a common camp on the western plains, and there, matters of common interest—usually mutual defence and shared raiding enterprises— would be discussed without obligation on any side; there was never, so far as I have been able to ascertain, any permanent council of the Blackfoot Confederacy.

The Iroquois tribes during their pre-Canadian period did have a common council of sachems, in whose selection the women, whose influence derived from their control of agriculture, played a great role; but this council did not interfere in the internal affairs of the tribes, so that it remained the co-ordinating body of a true confederation rather than the government of the state.

It seems to me that this history of anarchic and federalist organization, based on the negation of centralized political authority, gives the Indians a position of special advantage in the modern world—once they can gain the economic basis of a fair land settlement. Then they will be in a marvellous position to reculer pour mieux sauter, to draw on the lessons of their own past to help them rebuild their societies.

We, the others, might learn a great deal about ways to solve our own problems by watching them. They have developed more political sophistication, and groups like the Inuit and the Dene, so disunited before, now consider themselves “nations,” though by this they do not mean “nation-states” but groups of people with their own languages, land, and traditions.

There is no Indian “nation” because the variety of native traditions leaves no room for one, and no thought of an “Indian” state exists. The aims of native people today lean rather towards establishing a number of small self-governing sovereignties with federal links with the rest of Canada. And why not, since Canada's destiny is surely a confederal one in need of experimental social and political forms?

Aurora: You've written recently rather positively about the evolution of the Canadian nation-state in the nineteenth century as a contribution to the development of a national identity. Do you believe generally that nationalism can be a positive force, and if so, how do you distinguish healthy and unhealthy nationalism?

Woodcock: Alas, how easily even a writer whose reputation rests so largely on his clear prose can be misunderstood!

I have never written, as you suggest, on the Canadian nation-state or on any other nation-state in a positive way, since my view of such political structures and their effects is entirely negative. They have been and still are responsible for most of the major disasters of the modern world, including of course two major wars and the outbreak of such totalitarian maladies as National Socialism in Germany and nationalistic Communism in Stalin's Russia. Modern communications have rendered them wholly obsolete, yet the survival of these outdated dinosaurs prevents us from creating effective international organizations; they have turned the United Nations into a mockery of what we need, and within countries they have prevented the development of effective systems based on the contemporary demand for participatory democracy and libertarian decentralism.

I may, as a historian, have at times objectively traced the development of a nationalist tendency in Canadian politics; who could fail to do so? But always, whether dealing with Sir John A. MacDonald and his National Policy (which was unashamedly structured to favour Central Canada and ruin the Maritime provinces) or Pierre Trudeau (with his undated Jacobinical centralism whose consequences may yet tear Canada apart), I have condemned any attempt to create a nation-state here. To do so would be out of keeping with the country's history and geography, its vast cultural variety, and its long-term inclinations towards regional autonomy and towards recreating in terms suitable for the twentieth century the sovereignties of the native peoples.

We have in this country a unique opportunity to take up the lead which the Swiss offered at the end of the Middle Ages and to present a true con-federal society to the world, a grand experiment that would help spell the end of the nation-state everywhere.

Like George Orwell, I believe patriotism (a love of one's land or community and not of its political system) to be a positive force. Patriotism at its best is cohesive. It leads us to respect others as we are able to respect ourselves; it is not divisive, as is nationalism, which is built on fear and resentment.

Aurora: Your work on Gandhi makes clear your admiration of pacifist principles. Do you think such principles have a greater degree of support now than early this century, or does the cooling of superpower tension, for example, simply reflect a lull in the world's continuous history of war-making?

Woodcock: I am sure that active pacifism has increased and that resistance to participation in warfare, i.e. conscientious objection, would be higher than ever before in the event of large scale wartime call-ups in the western countries. In themselves, such individual gestures are probably of little importance, but they do reflect a general dread of war and a general, though somewhat vague and diffused, resolution that major conflicts must not occur again. I think the awareness of this barely articulated feeling does weigh on the minds of politicians, but they are much more influenced by the sheer destructiveness of any foreseeable major war.

At the end of 1979 I was asked on a CBC panel show whether I foresaw a major war as a likely prospect in the 1980s. Not a major war, I answered, but a lot of nasty little wars. That of course is what happened, and some of the nasty little wars are continuing, in places like Angola, Ethiopia, Sudan, and Afghanistan, without much benefit to anyone and with a great deal of harm to millions. During this period even the major powers became involved only in “nasty little wars”—the Russians in Afghanistan, the British in the Falklands, the Americans in Grenada.

I think there will never again be a World War like those of the past. And only some horrifying miscalculation is likely to set off an atomic war. But there are powerful interests, both industrial and political, that are likely to encourage small wars in the hinterlands of the world, where ever-more-sophisticated conventional weapons can be tried out and consumed. There is still not a strong enough world opinion to prevent it. Even a country like Sweden, neutral by law and largely pacifist in sentiment, profits from selling the Bofors gun to potential belligerents.

What is needed is a grand gesture from a country of standing which would declare neutrality and transform its armed forces into a redemption corps dedicated to rehabilitating polluted and devastated areas of the country, tree planting, etc. Canada would be ideal for this role.

Aurora: The destruction of the environment is an issue that has recently assumed political importance. Is it possible to change the lifestyles that contribute to environmental degradation without extensive state regulations? In general, how easily can one reconcile notions of civil liberties and individual choice with reasonable limitations placed on our endeavours by the needs of the environment?

Woodcock: In principle I am opposed to attempts to save the environment by compulsion and by the kind of regulations that would reach into every home. Unless a great majority of the people is already convinced, such attempts to change behaviour by wholesale compulsion usually fail, and very often they have socially disastrous side-effects.

Think of prohibition in the United States, the popular resistance to which produced an era of organized and profitable crime. Think also of the pathetically unsuccessful attempts in recent years to suppress drug consumption, which again have heightened the profits of crime and encouraged its spread, accompanied by widespread corruption among politicians and public servants.

The approach to environmental issues—the most effective and least disruptive one—I suggest should be a double one. Most pollution still comes from the major industries (pulp mills, oil refineries, logging operations, chemical factories), and strict codes should be laid down for them, with heavy fines and eventually dispossession as the penalities for noncompliance. (Imprisonment should not be a penalty; that makes martyrs and is counter-productive.)

The general public, seeing the major polluters brought in line, would be encouraged to play their major part in recycling, and in avoiding petty pollutions, particularly if the municipalities were also penalized for non-treatment of sewage, perhaps by the withdrawal of federal and provincial grants.

Municipalities should also be held responsible for recycling depots and ensuring transport to them for the recyclable garbage people are persuaded to put out in their “blue boxes.” Certain products, like white toilet paper, should obviously be phased out, but that should not be difficult once the major polluters are dealt with and the public encouraged to make a habit of environmental carefulness.

Aurora: Do you think that increased trade has limited the ability of national governments to set their own economic agenda, as economists keep telling us? If so, is that likely to contribute to greater international harmony or to detract from it?

Woodcock: Economists are usually wrong. The point here surely lies in the question: “Why should governments set any economic agenda?” Surely that is ideally for the producers to decide, and in a true confederal society it would be easy, with each industry self-managed.

Self-managed industries are always more flexible in dealing with competition and with international trade situations than state-managed ones, because they are more flexible (as the economic crisis of Communist countries have shown). By self-managed, of course, I mean industries in which the workers have a fair share in ownership and management, which eliminates owner-worker dissent and leaves individual enterprises and whole industries more room to manoeuvre.

There is no real reason why industries in one country should not make their own terms with similar industries in others, without governments interfering. Indeed, they sometimes do that already. The great danger is not competition between parallel industries in various countries, but the elimination of competition by the growing power of the multinational corporations. It is that respectable but ruthless financial mafia that must be controlled and in the end destroyed.

Aurora: What issues generally will become the key ones for civil libertarians in the years to come?

Woodcock: 

The abortion issue will remain with us for a long time, though in terms of civil liberties it is a straightforward one, with women having a complete right to control their own bodies. I think in the decades ahead we have to make decisions on the vital issue of libertarian versus paternalistic government. Too often nowadays people are being controlled “for their own good,” instead of being allowed to go to Hell, if they wish, in their own particular handbaskets. This explains the current mania for stamping out smoking, with all its exasperating restrictions, and also, as I have already pointed out, our foolish policies on drugs. If freedom means anything, it means the freedom of people to harm themselves if that is their choice.

On more specific civil libertarian issues, I think we have to be alert to attacks on freedom of the press, which are now being made covertly, through the taxing procedures. The proposed extension of the Goods and Services Act to books is an obvious instance, especially since books have long been exempt from Customs duties in Canada.

So is the similar tax on periodicals, which will most affect the more outspoken and experimental papers, also hit by the Goods and Services Tax. This is a none-too-subtle form of censorship by elimination directed at the very publications and publishers most likely to bring out writing critical of the regime. To tax books is only a degree less atrocious than to ban or burn them.

Sometimes I am asked whether I foresee the danger of a totalitarian government in Canada. The danger does not have to be foreseen; it is here. Let us do our best to prevent this being realized.

Books by George Woodcock

Beyond the Blue Mountain. Toronto: Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 1987.

Introducing the Stone Angel. ECW Press, 1987.

Northern Spring: The Flowering of Canadian Literature. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1987.

Strange Bedfellows: The State and the Arts in Canada. Douglas & McIntyre, 1985.

A Place to Stand On: Essays by and about Margaret Laurence. Edmonton: NeWest Press, 1983.

Letter to the Past: An Autobiography. Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 1982.

The Canadians. Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 1979.

Gabriel Dumont: The Metis Chief and His Lost World. Edmonton: Hurtig, 1975.

Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements. Harmondsworth, England: Markham, 1962.

Article originally published Fall 1990

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An Aurora Update

George Woodcock died in 1995 at age 82. Prior to his death he was awarded the Freedom of City award on February 22, 1994 (Freedom of the City is the highest award given by the City of Vancouver. Reserved for individuals of exceedingly high merit, it is given only in exceptional cases, usually to someone who has gained national and international acclaim in the arts, business or philanthropy, and who has brought recognition to Vancouver through his or her achievements).

Further information on George Woodcock can be found at:

UBC: Canadian Litertaure

Updated July 2001

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Aurora Online

Citation Format

Finkel, Alvin (1990). Anarchy, Freedom, Native People & the Environment: George Woodcock. Aurora Online: 

Black Flag Protest Against Bush

Mahatama Gandhi was considered the Gentle Anarchist by Canadian Anarchist writer and Gandhi Biographer George Woodcock. Woodcock saw in Gandhi that Direct Action which was non-violent, the kind of spiritual anarchism advocated by the Russian Writer (who inspired my Dido, grandfather) Tolstoy.

Thus, Tolstoy writes:

The situation of the oppressed should not be compared to the constraint used directly by the stronger on the weaker, or by a greater number on a smaller. Here, indeed it is the minority who oppress the majority , thanks to a lie established ages ago by clever people, in virtue of which men despoil each other. ...

Then, after a long quote from La Boetie, Tolstoy concludes,

It would seem that the workers, not gaining any advantage from the restraint that is exercised on them, should at last realize the lie in which they are living and free themselves in the simplest and easiest way: by abstaining from taking part in the violence that is only possible with their co-operation.

Leo Tolstoy, The Law of Love and the Law of Violence (New York: Rudolph Field, 1948), pp. 42-45.

Furthermore, Tolstoy's Letter to a Hindu, which played a central role in shaping Ghandi's thinking toward mass non-violent action, was heavily influenced by La Boetie. See Bartelemy de Ligt, The Conquest of Violence (New York, E.P. Dutton & Co., 1938), pp. 105-6.

Etienne de La Boetie, Vrijwillige Slavernij (The Hague, 1933, edited by Bart. de Ligt). Cited in Bart. de Ligt, op. cit., p. 289. Also see ibid., pp. 104-6. On Landauer, see ibid., p. 106, and George Woodcock, Anarchism (Cleveland, Ohio: World Pub. Co., 1962), p. 432

George Woodcock, Civil Disobedience (Toronto: Canadian Broadcasting Corp., 1966)

Woodcock, George-, Gandhi, London : Fontana/Collins, 1972.

Woodcock, George-, Mohandas Gandhi, New York, Viking Press [1971]

Nonviolence Versus Capitalism, by Brian Martin, in Gandhi Marg, 1999

The Black Flag is the symbol of Anarchism. In India when George Bush arrives to set flowers on Ghandi's grave this Thursday he will be met with mass protests, appropriately deemed the Black Flag Protest.

Of course the Black Flag has a different meaning in Islam.....


Bush's scheduled visit and offer of flowers on Gandhi's cemetery an "act of defilement"

New Delhi, Feb 27, IRNA

India-Bush-Protests

Offering of flowers on Father of the Nation Mahatama Gandhi's cemetery by a person (Bush) who has become the largest exporter of death and destruction through its expanding defense business would be an "act of defilement."
US President George W Bush's policies were responsible for the death of thousands of innocent people all over the world, said a prominent writer, Arundhati Roy, at a prayer meeting held yesterday at the Rajghat (Mahatama Gandhi's cemetery).

Roy said the offering of flowers on Gandhi's samadhi by Bush would be seen by the people as an act of defilement.

Hundreds of people under the banner of Azadi Bachao Andolan, Lok Raj Sangathan and Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind gathered at the Rajghat to pray for peace and voice their protest against the upcoming visit to India and the Gandhi memorial of US President George Bush.

Participants included Hindus, Muslims, Jains, Sikhs and Christians. Hundreds of youths sported "Keep Bush Out" slogans on their shirts.

Among those who took part in the prayer meeting were writer Arundhati Roy, Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind general secretary Farooqui, Lok Raj Sangathan activist Sucharita and former IPS officer K S Subramanian.

The organizers have appealed to the people to turn out in large numbers for the protests planned against Bush's visit.

George Bush is scheduled to visit the Rajghat on March 2.

Meanwhile, Left parties along with many other parties, including the Samajawadi Party, have indicated they would participate in the planned countrywide protests for three days during the visit of American president.

The Joint Action Committee (JAC) of three Punjab-based NGOs -- Lok Morcha Punjab, Inkalabi Kendra Punjab and Lok Sangram Morcha -- has said it would hold a black flag protest in front of the US embassy in Delhi on March 2.

The JAC said it would protest the Indo-US military pacts and the "continuous oppression unleashed by US forces in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine.

Similar demonstrations have been planned countrywide.

In Lucknow, religious scholars led by noted Shia cleric Maulana Kalbe Jawaad and the Imam of Lucknow's oldest Sunni mosque Maulana Fazlur Rehman, have said Muslims will wear black clothes and also release black baloons from rooftops.

NOVEL PROTEST: Children with a poster against war during a demonstration in front of the Mahatama Gandhi statue in Bangalore on Sunday. — Photo: V. Sreenivasa Murthy

As children stood around the poster, they were telling the warmongers to keep off.

"Mr. George Bush cannot unilaterally decide upon a war on the people of Iran. Dictators should not play with the innocent lives of people," they were talking for the voiceless millions, the children who often suffered the most.

Children are often dismissed and excluded from social life and political decisions.

The reason: they are seen as not possessing the maturity and discerning ability to take sound decisions.

"But what sense do presidents and prime ministers have to wage war and put children into misery?," they asked.

In any war, the first victims are always children. Nobody cautioned them when bombs were dropped on Hiroshima, in Vietnam and in Iraq.

"Of the 60 million people killed in World War II, 24 million were children."

Shouting slogans, the children were telling the world to pause and beware of the wrongs of war.

"The people of America do not want war. The children of Iran do not want to fight. The people of India desire peace. Stop the Bush bomb. Save the children of Iran. Save the children of the world," the children were pleading for a just world, far from the violence perpetuated by the "thinking" adults.

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
Bush, India, Gandhi, Anarchism, Woodcock, Tolstoy, Protests, Anti-War, children, Bombs, Iran, Nuclear

Glass windows kill billions of birds a year. Scientists are working to change that

Conservationists are trying to convince governments and building owners around the world to introduce changes to stop birds from flying into reflective glass. Experts say the solutions are surprisingly simple.


Glass buildings stop many migrating birds dead in their tracks

Divya Anantharaman points her flashlight under the wooden benches surrounding an office tower near Wall Street. At this time, the streets of New York are still the exclusive domain of early risers. But starting her weekly search and rescue mission at this ungodly hour is essential, she says.

She's looking for the victims of notorious bird killers: glass skyscrapers. When daylight breaks, doormen will sweep the sidewalks clean, and evidence of the dead will be lost.

Anantharaman volunteers for NYC Audubon, an urban conservation group that monitors bird deaths from window collisions. She inspects every dark corner on her route, looking through planters, careful not to miss a collision victim she could rescue. At the end of her round, she finds a dead bird beneath a gleaming glass overpass connecting two buildings.

It's an American woodcock, she thinks, a relatively common migrating bird with a long beak. Every spring, woodcocks pass through New York after spending the cold months in Alabama and other Gulf coast states. This bird is stiff, which means it recently died, Anantharaman says. "The eyes are still so clear — this may have happened minutes ago." She snaps photos, takes a solemn moment to close the eyelids with her thumb and puts the corpse into her pink backpack.

A casualty of a window collision in New York City

A billion birds and counting

Every year, 90,000 to 230,000 birds crash into New York buildings, NYC Audubon estimates. The city's concentration of illuminated buildings is a dangerous obstacle for winged travelers, especially during the spring and fall migration seasons.

New York sits on a migration route to South America, where many birds spend the winter. Since birds navigate using stars, artificial nighttime light attracts and disorients them. Believing they are flying toward starlight, the birds detour and land in the middle of an unfamiliar metropolis.

"The biggest problem is reflective glass," NYC Audubon biologist Kaitlyn Parkins says. "Birds don't see a reflection of a tree. To them, it's a tree. They fly at it, can accelerate very quickly and often die immediately."

In the US, where most of the research into bird collisions has been done, buildings are responsible for the deaths of up to 1 billion birds every year, the pioneering ornithologist Daniel Klem calculated in the 1990s. But glass windows are deathtraps all over the world.

"Birds are vulnerable to glass wherever birds and glass are found together. They don't see the bloody stuff," Klem says. He adds that it's not skyscrapers but rather low- and midrise buildings that pose the biggest threat.

Klem, now a professor at Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania, considers window collisions a fundamental issue for the conservation of birds. "As a threat, I would put collision right after habitat destruction," he says. "What's so insidious is that windows kill indiscriminately. They also take the fittest in the population. We can't afford to lose any individual, let alone good breeders."

Volunteer Divya Anantharaman picks up a dead woodcock on the streets of New York

An international problem

In recent years, conservation groups and scientists have taken up the cause. Binbin Li leads one of two groups monitoring window strikes in China. She is an assistant professor of environmental sciences at Duke Kunshan University and earned a PhD at Duke in the US. There she met the leading researcher of the university's bird collision project.

"First, I thought this was only a problem at Duke, or in the States — I could not imagine seeing it here in China," she says. But, after her return, she got reports of three dead birds on campus within a month.

With a group of students, she now counts birds killed in flight on campus in Suzhou. Many of the victims, she notes, are found under glass corridors, just like the woodcock Anantharaman found in New York.

Li started a national survey to get a clearer picture of the problem. Three major migration pathways cut through China, but data on fatalities along these routes is still limited. "We realized that bird collision is not well-known in China, not even in academia," Li says.

'Just change the glass and turn off the lights'

In Costa Rica, Rose Marie Menacho had to convince her professors to let her investigate bird collisions as a PhD student eight years ago. "They didn't know much about this subject, didn't know it was a real problem," she recalls. "Even I was a bit shy saying I was studying this. I was a little ashamed because I thought it was not so big."

To understand the scale of the problem in the tropics, she now works with about 500 volunteers. Some store feathered corpses in their freezers, others send her reports and photos. "Not only migrating species collide," she says. Her volunteers recovered vibrantly colored quetzals and toucans with flamboyant oversize beaks. Both are local species.

A dead woodcock found on the streets of New York City

"Collision kills many birds who already have to deal with habitat loss, climate change, pesticides, et cetera," says Parkins, the biologist. "And it's so easy to solve — just change the glass and turn off the lights."

With the data they gather, Parkins and her team are trying to convince the owners of glass buildings to act. Usually, they don't need to replace any glass. Special foil can make it less reflective — and saves energy for heating and cooling. Markings on the windows can help birds see the structure. In one example, after a bird-friendly renovation of the Javits Convention Center, volunteers have found about 90% fewer dead birds around the building.

New York City adopted legislation in January to require public buildings to turn off lights at night during migration seasons. Since last year, architects must also use bird-friendly designs for all new buildings such as ultraviolet coating on glass, which is visible to birds but not to humans.

New regulations are a good start

On the sidewalk in front of Brookfield Place, an enormous office and shopping center on the southern tip of Manhattan, Rob Coover inspects a small bird. Daylight is still scarce, but he has already searched for dead birds for half an hour.

He checks carefully behind the piles of chairs the workers of a coffee shop will soon use on their terrace. Twice already he has bent over a tiny, stiff corpse to take photos. Now he again takes rubber gloves and plastic sandwich bags out of his backpack to pick up and preserve a body.

Rob Coover snaps photos of a victim of a window collision

Coover once found 27 birds in a single morning. A fellow volunteer made international headlines when she picked up 226 lifeless birds around One World Trade Center in a single hour last September.

"It's quite depressing, all these dead bodies," Coover says. Sometimes he finds a survivor and takes the wounded animal to a bird sanctuary. Dead bodies usually go into his freezer until he has time to take them to the headquarters of the conservation group, where they are collected and some are distributed to museums. "Before the pandemic, I went to work after my rounds and put them in the office freezer." No one ever noticed, he adds.

In the United States and Canada, volunteers are active in several communities, and the list of local governments enacting legislation to protect birds from buildings is growing. According to the nonprofit American Bird Conservancy, New York's law is one of the most effective additions. After studying bird collisions for almost half a century Daniel Klem is delighted. He finally sees the growing awareness he has been hoping for.

"Climate change is also a very serious issue — nobody is interested in distracting from that. But it's very complex, and it is going to take us a while to figure things out and convince people to do things responsibly," he says. "Bird collisions, that's something we could solve tomorrow. It's not complex; we just have to have the will."

Edited by: Ruby Russell