UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — In August 2022, the Penn State College of the Liberal Arts broke ground on the new 143,000-square-foot Susan Welch Liberal Arts Building adjacent to the Donald H. Ford Building, which sits near the corner of E. Park Avenue and Allen Street.
The building, scheduled to be complete in fall 2024, will be the first new liberal arts building at Penn State in more than 50 years. It will serve as an innovative hub of social science teaching, research and outreach activity for many academic units, labs, centers, institutes and other state-of-the-art learning spaces.
As a result of a partnership between Penn State Sustainability, the Office of Physical Plant, and the College of the Liberal Arts, the building also will be home to several bird-friendly features, including a section of bird-friendly glass and an experimental design feature that should help prevent window strikes.
Window strikes occur when birds collide with glass windows, often fatally. Due to the ocular anatomy of birds and how they perceive depth, they cannot see glass. In daylight, they may collide with glass because reflections of foliage and vegetation appear as a continuation of the landscape around them. At night, nocturnal migrants are attracted by lighted windows and crash while attempting to land indoors. It is estimated that up to 1 billion birds die from window strikes yearly in the U.S.
Thanks to $65,000 of funding received from Penn State Sustainability, the Welch Building will be equipped to counter this design challenge sustainably. On the first floor, a dual space classroom/community room was identified as the most likely place where window strikes could occur. It will now be built using bird glass, a traditional and professionally produced solution featuring permanent markings — dots or stripes — etched onto the window’s exterior face that allow birds to see the surface before flying into it.
Above the community room will be a tall, glassy design ascending the vertical length of the building. Here, University Architect Greg Kufner has approved a more experimental approach.
“On this glass extension, we will be utilizing a pilot approach to prevent bird strikes,” Kufner explained. “Designing a deep framing system around this particular window wall was a relatively minimal investment. Also, the window framing, or ‘mulions,’ are purposely more concentrated at the building’s glassy corners. Our human eyes can perceive glass corners, but birds are more likely to ‘see through’ the glassy corner. The combination of framing decisions will make this area appear more solid to birds and lessen the ‘see-through’ concerns at the glass corners. I am hopeful this clever shift will prove a successful preventive approach.”
Associate Professor of Biobehavioral Health Joe Gyekis plans to monitor this and other buildings at University Park with help from his informal student group interested in promoting preventive measures against window strikes. The group also was helpful in providing information, resources and advice to address avian safety concerns associated with the Welch Building.
“What we want to do with the new Palmer Art Museum and the Susan Welch Liberal Arts Building is perform daily perimeter checks during peak migration season,” Gyekis said. “We usually perform these checks in the late morning because many collisions occur earlier in the day. We’ll record the number of collisions we observe, which areas of the building are hit, the species, and other relevant information.”
The student group began when Chyvonne Jessick, then an undergraduate student who is now a doctoral candidate in ecology, received an Erickson Discovery Grant to fund her project to standardize bird-window monitoring of 10 buildings at University Park. As a part of her research project, she also began the @psu_birdstrikes Instagram page, which documents bird-window collisions on campus and houses the group’s qualtrics survey where any member of the Penn State community or visitors may report strikes.
“I find it satisfying to be engaged in a topic where education and information are critically needed,” said Gyekis of his outreach efforts to prevent bird strikes. “There are many caring, compassionate, willing-to-take-action people who simply don’t know what a preventable issue this is. There is so much to be gained by implementing very achievable, almost 100% effective, cost-effective, aesthetic solutions.”
Gyekis recommends that those interested in preventing strikes in homes, offices or other personal settings begin by retrofitting their easiest-to-access windows with stickers, window clings, paint pens, or hangings that create two-inch spacings.
“If we started with the easiest, smallest windows to retrofit, we would have a much bigger impact than all the convention centers in all the big cities in the world,” he explained.
There are myriad ways for Penn Staters to engage in bird conservation and safety. Students interested in getting involved with bird strike prevention can contact Gyekis to apply for two open positions performing research and advocacy. Other opportunities include getting involved with the State College Bird Club, Shaver’s Creek Environmental Center, following the @psu_birdstrikes Instagram account, reporting a strike on campus, or taking action to prevent strikes at your home or office.
Penn State Sustainability is engaged in providing more support for bird-friendly initiatives at Penn State and is seeking support to pursue this work through its 2023 GivingTuesday campaign. Early giving options opened on Nov. 13, and will continue through GivingTuesday on Nov. 28. All donations will be used to retrofit existing buildings with bird-friendly treatments and to create lighting solutions that make it easier to turn off outdoor lighting across campus when not in use or necessitated in deference to human safety concerns.
“We are thrilled to pursue a new chapter of environmental stewardship by supporting bird-friendly solutions at Penn State,” said Lara Fowler, director of Penn State Sustainability and chief sustainability officer at Penn State. “Our focus on these initiatives — exhibited in both our partnership with the College of the Liberal Arts and by working to identify future opportunities to address biodiversity challenges — is reflective of our commitment to harmonizing campus life with the natural world. Together, we can enhance Penn State’s reputation as a sustainability leader and serve as an example of how institutions can coexist harmoniously with nature.”
In addition to the bird-friendly features, the Welch Building will be Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certified, which provides a framework for healthy, highly efficient and cost-saving green buildings. With this certification in mind, care was taken to consider sustainability principles throughout its construction, using local materials, when possible, like brick, limestone and steel. The Indigenous Faculty and Staff Alliance also was a noteworthy collaborator, as it approved plans to install Sweetland prairie and other native plantings that will honor regional tribes’ traditional uses of the plants and require less water and long-term maintenance than non-native landscaping options. The roof also will be photovoltaic ready — meaning that the building will be capable of supporting solar infrastructure as solar energy becomes more accessible and affordable.
