The job title alone made me want to shadow Renate Witt. She's a bird collision monitor.

Renate is among a dozen volunteers who walk downtown streets early in the morning to look for birds that have flown into glassy buildings during the spring and fall migration seasons.

Think bird watchers who look down instead of up. It's a situation when you'd rather not find what you're looking for.

We found two. Both dead. Both cedar waxwings with pretty little splashes of red and yellow on their feathers. They were about 40 feet apart lying in a planter near an E. Mason St. skywalk, which is probably what they hit. Maybe even together, though that's just a guess.

"They're trying to survive, and the odds aren't always in their favor," Renate said after scooping the lifeless birds into a plastic sandwich-size bag.

This duty makes her sad. But here's the way she looks at it. These birds find themselves in a tricky man-made environment, "and I'm doing my little part as a member of the human race to try to counteract the negative impact on their lives."

She volunteers for the Wisconsin Humane Society's WINGS program, which stands for Wisconsin Night Guardians for Songbirds. The carcasses she collects are carefully cataloged.

This is from the program's website: "Our efforts include inviting corporate building managers to make their tall buildings bird-safe and encouraging everyone to do their part at work and at home to help protect birds from the hazards of window collisions."

It's best if the lights in these buildings are turned off at night during migrations. And putting decals on home windows helps steer birds away. That's the ideal, of course.

"The Milwaukee business community has not responded as we had hoped to our WINGS program," said Scott Diehl, manager of the Humane Society's Wildlife Rehabilitation Center.

That's where Renate and other monitors drop off the birds they find. Some of them are found alive but injured. Renate carries a net in her backpack to help ease them into a paper bag for the trip. Some can be saved; many cannot. A 25-gram bird doesn't have much of a chance when hitting a solid object at high speed.

Renate and I had time to talk while we walked Tuesday among the buildings of Northwestern Mutual, U.S. Bank and O'Donnell Park near the lakefront, which is a natural migration corridor. She's 49 years old and a software engineer who lives on Milwaukee's far north side. She also volunteers for the Ozaukee Washington Land Trust and the Urban Ecology Center.

"I love nature. I love the environment. And I love birds," she said.

That's why she's out here once a week at 6:30 in the morning scanning the streets and plazas for unlucky fliers. She doesn't attract any attention until she leans down to pick one up. Most of us are raised not to touch dead animals, so people on their way to work probably can't imagine why she's doing exactly that. It's simple science. She's attacking the problem by gathering data that she hopes will lead to a solution.

Diehl has seen a statistic that hundreds of millions of birds die in window collisions in North America each year. Most are never found.

It's not good for the ecosystem, he said, and it's a senseless loss each time it happens.

"It's a tragedy, really, of a bird that had hatched perhaps in northern Wisconsin or even right here in one of our county parks, and will fly perhaps 2,000 miles across numerous hazards, possibly across the Gulf of Mexico, spend a winter in a rain forest or some other similar habitat in South or Central America, make a harrowing journey back across those same obstacles, and then die in downtown Milwaukee on a sixteenth-of-an-inch piece of glass. To me, that's really sad," he said.

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Jim Stingl

Brian holds bachelors and master's degree in Biology from the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee. His master's degree work had an emphasis on the fish population biology of the Upper Midwest.

Brian received training in HTML and JavaScript while working at the United States Environmental Protection Agency (U.S.E.P.A.) in Chicago. While working at the Great Lakes W.A.T.E.R. Institute in Milwaukee, and at the U.S.E.P.A., Brian created print and digital maps and graphics for web use. Currently Brian is working to update and streamline the OWLT database. His work with Land Protection Specialist Steve Henkel produced templates and information interaction to more efficiently manage easement applications and follow-through. Brian’s template design is also being applied to other parts of the Trust’s data system. 

In his spare time Brian organizes the Southeastern Wisconsin Native Fish Club, when not collecting and breeding Wisconsin native fish species.

Since 2005 Mary has been a steady Land Trust volunteer. When not volunteering Mary is studying Spanish or playing the Trumpet in the “River City Irregulars”.  A regular YMCA member, travel and a cottage in northern Wisconsin take up her time. Many of you know Mary as the East High School Principle for over 16 years.

Thanks Mary for making OWLT part of your week.

With a short walk across the street, Joanne has made a week pilgrimage to the Depot.  Since September Joanne has been compiling the news clippings and articles separated out by volunteer Barb Gahan.  Now the OWLT history is documented tin three striking volumes. We invite you to come by and see her work.