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Picture of 4,000 dead birds in Toronto wins international photography award

Peter Sanders

As It Happens6:26Picture of 4,000 dead birds in Toronto wins international photography award

All 4,000 birds in Patricia Homonylo’s award-winning picture died preventable deaths, the Toronto conservation photographer said.

The image, called When Worlds Collide, shows the bodies of birds that fatally collided with buildings in Toronto last year.

It earned Homonylo this year’s Bird Photography of the Year award. 

“I want people to be shocked by this image,” Homonylo told As It Happens host Nil Köksal. “I want them to really think about what they’re seeing.”

‘Beautiful and tragic’

The picture features a wild turkey at its centre, surrounded by concentric circles of smaller and smaller birds, including hawks, owls, warblers, blue jays and more.

Their bodies were collected and arranged by members of the Fatal Light Awareness Program (FLAP), a Canadian charity where Homonylo volunteers, which helps birds injured in these kinds of collisions.

“Unfortunately, most of the birds they find are dead. [But] those bodies are never left behind,” Homonylo said.

“Once a year, the volunteers get together and they create this beautiful and tragic image of the birds called The Layout. And that’s what you’re looking at.”

Environment Canada estimates as many as 42 million birds die from collisions with windows every year in this country. Already this year, FLAP has recorded 331,718 fatal bird collisions in North America. 

And a study published last month in the journal Plos One found that window collisions are even deadlier for birds than previously believed, and that only 40 per cent of birds injured this way in the northeastern United States survived.

What can you do?

Homonylo says it doesn’t have to be this way. 

“What I really hope that people understand and take away is there’s something they can do,” she said.

All over Canada, volunteers, conservationists and bird scientists are working to prevent these collisions, CBC News reported last week in its feature story, Flight Risk.

“I know there’s killing in nature, but this is very preventable and it’s just very sad,” Montrealer Doris Potter told reporter Benjamin Shingler.

Potter helped advocate for a new bylaw in the Montreal borough of Saint-Laurent that forces companies to reduce the reflectivity of the glass surface on all new large buildings. 

woman pointing at dots on glass
FLAP Canada’s Kaitlin Brough checks for birds outside a Scarborough office building featuring glass with bird-strike mitigation on Sept. 13, 2024. (Evan Mitsui/CBC)

FLAP says Canadians who are concerned about birds should follow Potter’s lead and push their lawmakers to enact legislation that enforces bird-safe building standards. 

And on a personal level, the charity urges people to make their own windows and glass structures bird safe by covering them in paint, decals, string, film or other materials. 

But perhaps the easiest thing people can do, Homonylo says, is turn off the lights. Migratory birds use starlight as a guide, and the lights emanating from cities can throw them off course.

Homonylo says her photo may be upsetting, but there’s a positive aspect to it as well. 

“This is about honouring lives lost,” she said. “I hope people take a solemn moment of contemplation about that as well. We are less if we lose our birds.”

The other winners

The Bird Photography of the Year bills itself as “a celebration of avian beauty and diversity, and a tribute to the flexibility and quality of today’s modern digital imaging systems.”

Homonylo beat 23,000 submissions to earn the top prize of £3,500 ($6,270 Cdn).

Gold, silver and bronze awards are also given out across eight categories for adults, and three for youths. Homonylo’s When Worlds Collide also won gold in the Conservation category. 

See the rest of this year’s gold winners below.

An underwater photo shows a trio of long gray birds, pictured from below as they swoop through the blueish green water and leave bubbly trails in their wake, while the sun shines through the surface a few feet above.
U.S. photographer Kat Zhou won gold in the Birds in the Environment category at the 2024 Bird Photography of the Year Awards for this picture, titled Immersion. Taken while scuba diving, it shows northern gannets diving into the ocean on a sunny day in Shetland, U.K. (Kat Zhou/Bird Photographer of the Year)
A bird with a gray head, a small yellow beak and a pinkish orange body perches on a snowy evergreen tree branch against a backdrop of a pink and blue sky filled with falling snowflakes.
U.S. photographer Alan Murphy won gold in the Portrait category with his image of a grey-crowned rosy-finch on a snowy day in Homer, Alaska. It’s called Winter Pink. (Alan Murphy/Bird Photographer of the Year)
A penguin looks straight into the camera as it slides on its belly, one front wing off to the side, and its two back legs and tail feather stuck up in the air.
U.S. photographer Nadia Haq won gold in the Comedy category for her shot of an adélie penguin, which she says was sliding across the ice in Antarctica ‘as if performing a modern dance move.’ It is aptly called A Modern Dancer. (Nadia Haq/Photographer of the Year)
A spiky-headed bird with striped wings appears to be flying straight up as it's silhouetted against a backdrop of bright, fiery orange on one side, and pure black on the other.
India’s Hermis Haridas took home gold in the Birds in Flight category with his picture, Dawn’s Whispers, which shows a Eurasian hoopoe flying vertically against an early-morning sky in Dubai. (Hermis Haridas/Bird Photographer of the Year)
A spikey headed bird with a gray and white body and a brown head leads four chicks across the street as a man in a reflective vest stops traffic and another man with a large video camera films.
Poland’s Grzegorz Długosz won gold in the Urban Birds category for Treacherous Journey, an image of a mother goosander leading her four chicks across the street in Warsaw, Poland, with help from local officials. Each year, the birds breed in a park about a kilometere away from the Vistula River, then bring their broods back to find food. (Grzegorz Długosz/Bird Photographer of the Year)
The tips of two white feathers are visible just beneath the surface of black water, emerging from a patch of rippling water that appears to take the shape of a hippopotamus head.
Australia’s David Stowe won gold in the Black and White category for his picture, Hippo Impression, which shows a hoary-headed grebe disappearing beneath the murky waters of Sydney to feed. Stowe says that if you squint, the ripples appear to take the shape of a hippopotamus head. (David Stowe/Photographer of the Year)
A large brown bird with a red head peers over its shoulder at the camera as it perches on the decomposing head of a bear on a forest floor covered in moss and dead leaves.
U.S. photographer Nathaniel Peck win gold in the Bird Behaviour category for this picture, titled Scavenger, of a turkey vulture feeding on the remains of an American black bear in West Virginia. (Nathaniel Peck/Bird Photographer of the Year)
A close-up of a long-necked bird with white and black fathers, sitting among some tall, yellow grass on a river's edge, launching its long, pointy beak into the water.
Julian Mendla, 12, of Germany won gold in the 11 And Under category for this image, titled Turbulent Fish Hunt, of a Eurasian bittern trying to catch a fish in Germany’s Lake Federsee. (Julian Mendla/Bird Photographer of the Year)
A small black and white bird with long legs is pictured at ground level, in focus, on a beach. Behind it, out of focus, is a dog facing away from the camera, looking at a man walking in its direction.
Emil Wagner, 17, of Germany won the 15-17 Years category for her shot of grey plover on a beach on the Baltic Sea in Western Pomerania, Germany, called Human Nature (And Dog). (Emil Wagner/Bird Photographer of the Year)
A sleek little bird with a long skinny beak, with yellowish orange features on the bottom and gray ones on the top, is pictured from below as it climbs down an oak tree.
Andrés Luis Domínguez Blanco, 14, of Spain won the 12-14 Years category with this image of a Eurasian nuthatch on an oak tree. (Andrés Luis Domínguez Blanco/Bird Photography of the Year)
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