The Bird-Friendly City: Creating Safe Urban Habitats

by Timothy Beatley

How does a bird experience a city? A backyard? A park? As the world has become more urban, noisier from increased traffic, and brighter from streetlights and office buildings, it has also become more dangerous for countless species of birds. Warblers become disoriented by nighttime lights and collide with buildings. Ground-feeding sparrows fall prey to feral cats. Hawks and other birds-of-prey are sickened by rat poison. These name just a few of the myriad hazards. How do our cities need to change in order to reduce the threats, often created unintentionally, that have resulted in nearly three billion birds lost in North America alone since the 1970s?
 
In The Bird-Friendly City , Timothy Beatley, a longtime advocate for intertwining the built and natural environments, takes readers on a global tour of cities that are reinventing the status quo with birds in mind. Efforts span a fascinating breadth of public education, urban planning and design, habitat restoration, architecture, art, civil disobedience, and more. Beatley shares empowering examples, advocates for “catios,” enclosed outdoor spaces that allow cats to enjoy backyards without being able to catch birds; a public relations campaign for vultures; and innovations in building design that balance aesthetics with preventing bird strikes. Through these changes and the others Beatley describes, it is possible to make our urban environments more welcoming to many bird species.
 
Readers will come away motivated to implement and advocate for bird-friendly changes, with inspiring examples to draw from. Whether birds are migrating and need a temporary shelter or are taking up permanent residence in a backyard, when the environment is safer for birds, humans are happier as well.

Genres: Birds

272 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2020

Reviews

[Cacey Cottrill · Rating 3 out of 5]

While most going into this book would think about the physical aspects of a city that make it unsafe for birds, Beatley also goes into the ways that humans and their decisions can also make cities unsafe for birds. From the pets that we have, to the chemicals that we use, there are many ways outside of the physical that impede birds that were interesting to think about.

I wanted to love this book more, but the quality of the writing and how it was out together hindered me giving it a higher rating. Many chapters didn’t seem to flow from one point to the next, with so much information inserted and not much discussion. Many of the stories a chapter was based on only took up a few pages and didn’t have the depth to learn a lot about them. Or some stories were repeated throughout the book before the chapter it was featured in to the point where the actual chapter didn’t contain much of anything. That is not to say that the examples used and points brought up were not interesting or good, just wished there was more discussion beyond just the stating that something occurs.

[Callie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love Professor Beatley! This book was super educational and combined a ton of different stories, ideas, and perspectives surrounding birds in cities and how we as humans can/should improve spaces for them.

[Nika · Rating 5 out of 5]

That’s not an easy reading, but we definitely need more books like this one.

[Daniela · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best thing about this book is that it is written by an architect. Informative and hopeful, makes you want to get into action to notice and help birds around you. That's the best type of book.