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A beacon for birds

You could say this story is for the birds, and Muffarah Jahangeer would likely agree. But her co-workers would likely object.

For them, the story is about what Jahangeer did for the birds and why what she did matters.

It is a simple enough story, with almost all the action set around a breezeway that connects MacNider and Burnett-Womack buildings on the south campus.

The breezeway also happens to run between two oak trees -- one that juts tall and straight along the eastern flank of MacNider, the other rooted so close to the breezeway that some of its branches brush the breezeway's northern face.

The breezeway obviously makes it easy for people to get back and forth between the two buildings.

The breezeway, not so obviously, turned the flight between the two trees into a kamikaze course for birds.

Jahangeer, a secretary in Information Systems for the School of Medicine, began noticing the "fat little dead bodies" of the fallen birds when she came in to work on weekends and could park her car near the breezeway.

She remembers being puzzled. She thought they might have been electrocuted, but there were no overhead power lines. It had to be something else.

Andy Parsons, who works with Jahangeer in Information Systems, solved the puzzle as Jahangeer returned from lunch weeks later. He was standing under the breezeway with a cigarette as she passed him, not far from another dead bird.

"Did you see what happened?" she asked.

As a smoker, Parsons had stood in this same spot day after day. And for weeks, he had been spotting dead birds. Robins. Gold finches. Song birds of various kinds he could not name. Often, he would find two or three scattered in the gravel below the steps. One day, there were five in a row as if they had been lined up and executed in some gangland slaying.

He had not seen the birds hit the wall, but he had put two and two together. There were live birds in the two oaks and dead ones in the gravel, always lying on the south side of the breezeway. "They try to fly to the other tree and smack into the glass," he told Jahangeer.

Years ago, while living in Washington, D.C., she had read about the curator of the Smithsonian, S. Dillon Ripley. Ripley was also an ornithologist and had discovered that pasting black silhouettes of soaring birds on windows kept the real thing from crashing into them. The museum used to sell the silhouettes to people interested in saving birds from their sliding glass doors and glass houses.

Jahangeer did not have time to find out if silhouettes were still available, or to wait for them to arrive. She went out and bought black construction paper to cut out the silhouettes herself.

Before hanging them up, she made a flurry of calls to make sure she had permission to do so. She called the dean's office, then the director of building services, then the director of facility planning, then the director of housekeeping and got a green light with each call. Mike O'Brien, the director of housekeeping, even saw to it that housekeepers assigned to the building would not take down the silhouettes.

Jahangeer taped messages on the inside of the silhouettes saying "Please Do Not Remove. This saves the birds from crashing into the glass."

"I was in a hurry and they are not perfect, but the birds seem to have understood," Jahangeer said.

Since she put up the silhouettes no more dead birds have been found beneath the breezeway.

Jahangeer's crusade to save the birds has created quite a stir among her co-workers. Most have been supportive. Some have taken turns praising and teasing her.

Parsons, for instance, has taken to typing "Save the Birds Campaign" at the bottom of the e-mail messages he sends to Jahangeer. For Parsons, there has been another unexpected benefit. "It was a good way to keep her from picking on me about smoking."

And then there was Eve Juliano.

"You don't want to talk to me," said Juliano, the director of an educational technology group with the School of Medicine. "I hate birds."

And she meant it. When she goes to a zoo, she never enters the aviary. Ever since she saw Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds the phrase "feathered friend" has seemed oxymoronic to her.

Yet, there she was wearing a broach shaped in the form a Canadian goose. A gag from her kids, she explained.

"Muffurah saw a bunch of dead birds strewn along the pavement and decided it was not a very good sight," Juliano said.

And on that point she can agree with her colleague. "I don't wish any harm to birds -- I just wish they would go away."

Survival of the fittest is a part of nature Jahangeer doesn't quibble with. But as she sees it, there is nothing natural about a plate of glass stuck in the middle of the air between two trees.

"Our campus is beautiful and we have an inherent responsibility on being on top of the food chain to preserve nature, especially when we create manmade artifacts which impede the life around us," Jahangeer said.

And in the past few weeks, the idea has been slowly catching on. Jahangeer's boss told her he had seen a decal near the Wilson Library. Somebody else spotted one on the breezeway near the Neurosciences Hospital.

Andy Maglione, another co-worker in Information Systems, has teased Jahangeer the most.

He remembers the time he and Jahangeer were walking on campus, and she stopped to pick up a plastic six-pack ring. Like the glass breezeways, the looped plastic posed another animal hazard she had to clear.

"I'm glad I haven't seen any whales around here lately," Maglione said.

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