At the University of Michigan, seemingly small actions build a culture of sustainability with impact across lifetimes.
This fall, first-year students in the Michigan Sustainability Community at Oxford Houses partnered with the Office of Campus Sustainability to install bird-friendly window film on several high-collision windows, helping make their residence safer for migratory birds and contributing to a more biodiverse campus.
The project originated in Campus as a Sustainability Lab (ENVIRON 245), a course taught by Joseph Trumpey, director of the MSC, professor of art in the Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design, and faculty member in the Program in the Environment.
As part of the course, students identify real sustainability challenges on campus and design hands-on projects to address them. The Oxford team chose to focus on bird safety, working with OCS to connect classroom learning with a tangible improvement to their living space.
“The students were eager to take on something visible and immediate — something they could experience every day,” said Daisy Hall, assistant director for the Michigan Sustainability Community. “It connects what they’re learning in the classroom with the place they call home.”
The patterned film helps birds recognize glass as a barrier, reducing collisions while maintaining visibility for building occupants. For the students, the project provided an opportunity to apply research-informed solutions and gain a deeper understanding of how design, behavior and environmental data intersect.
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“These kinds of student-led projects are at the heart of what we mean by a living learning laboratory,” said Shana Weber, associate vice president for campus sustainability. “They blend art, science and collaboration — and they help us translate ideas into action and then learn from them together.”
The Oxford Houses project is part of the university’s broader Bird Protection Program, a cross-campus initiative coordinated by OCS to reduce bird collisions and enhance biodiversity. Building collisions are the second-highest source of human-caused bird mortality nationwide, killing an estimated 1 billion birds in the United States each year.
The program combines research, monitoring and prevention, combining faculty-led collision data collection with operational pilots like Oxford Houses and a recent installation at the Dean Road Transportation Facility. Insights from these efforts inform both short-term mitigation and long-term design guidelines for new construction and renovations.
OCS coordinates bird-collision inventories each spring and fall migration season, in partnership with the Museum of Zoology, to identify high-risk locations.
This work involves training volunteers who commit to daily visits to search a building’s perimeter and log any dead, injured or stunned birds. Location information and photos are uploaded into an inventory form shared with the OCS project manager and Ben Winger, associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology in LSA, for data interpretation.
At buildings such as the Biological Sciences Research Building, reflections of sky and surrounding vegetation have been documented as contributing factors in bird-window strikes — further underscoring the need for targeted solutions.
“These smaller installations allow us to take meaningful action now while planning for larger-scale solutions,” said Anya Dale, manager of Campus as Lab in OCS. “They also strengthen relationships across units and help us learn what works before scaling solutions campuswide.”
In collaboration with faculty in Biological Sciences, OCS and campus volunteers are collecting data on when and where collisions occur and exploring how building features, lighting and landscaping influence these patterns. Over time, findings will help guide preventive actions such as film applications, lighting adjustments and updates to building design standards.
The Oxford team also explored other hands-on biodiversity efforts. They studied how the loss of dead and dying trees affects cavity-nesting birds on campus and built nesting boxes using lumber milled from campus logs at the U-M sawmill. The boxes are now being installed at the Campus Farm and Nichols Arboretum.
The effort also reflects the university’s Campus as Lab approach, which connects academic research and operational practice to address sustainability challenges in real time.
Through this model, students and faculty collaborate with staff to design, test and evaluate solutions that improve campus systems, from energy use and waste reduction to biodiversity and building design. Each project offers opportunities for hands-on learning and measurable impact, tying classroom concepts directly to the built environment students experience every day.
OCS will continue partnering with faculty and students to expand monitoring to additional high-risk buildings and pilot further bird-safe interventions, building toward long-term updates to campus design standards and biodiversity goals.
