As migrating birds travel across southeast Michigan each spring and fall, many are drawn toward the University of Michigan-Dearborn campus — a rare stretch of natural habitat surrounded by urban development.
“Our campus is a fantastic place for birds because the natural areas are like an island of green in the middle of this very urbanized area,” says Rick Simek, interpretive naturalist and manager of the natural areas at UM-Dearborn’s Environmental Interpretive Center. Simek oversees the stewardship of UM-Dearborn’s Environmental Study Area, a 120-acre preserve surrounding the EIC. “If you see it from a bird’s-eye view, it really does look like an oasis,” Simek says. But for some birds, that stopover can be dangerous. Reflective windows can confuse birds, making glass appear like open sky or habitat, leading to deadly collisions. “Window collisions are one of the major causes of bird mortality on our continent. It’s estimated that almost one billion birds in North America every year are killed by flying into windows,” Simek says.
That reality inspired Project Protect Avian Travel, a student-led initiative focused on tracking and reducing bird-window collisions across campus. Project PAT brings together students, faculty and staff to collect data, identify collision hot spots and help make campus safer for migrating birds.
More than 230 bird species have been documented in the campus natural areas, including migratory birds traveling between Canada and Central and South America. In addition, birds with at-risk populations, like the eastern whip-poor-will and threatened species like the cerulean warbler have been spotted at the EIC. According to Simek, birds often fly through the region overnight and stop on campus to recover and refuel before continuing their journey. “So many different species stop over at this campus,” he says. “It’s not some place where there’s maybe a few birds here and there. There are a lot of birds that stop over here during migration.”
The EIC’s efforts to protect migratory birds recently reached a milestone when UM-Dearborn became the first university in Michigan to receive Bird City Michigan Campus designation through Michigan Audubon. The designation recognizes campuses that actively support bird conservation through habitat protection, sustainability practices, education and community engagement. For the Environmental Interpretive Center, the recognition reflects years of work focused on understanding and protecting the campus’s unique ecosystem. In 2015, Simek developed a formal habitat management plan for the Environmental Study Area that continues to guide stewardship work today. The plan focuses on maintaining native species diversity, restoring damaged habitat and improving ecological health throughout the campus's natural areas. Staff and volunteers regularly remove invasive species, plant native trees and wildflowers, and manage habitat in ways that support both year-round bird populations and migratory stopover species.
That work has become especially important as migratory bird populations continue to decline across North America due to habitat loss and urban development. “There were some studies done that show over the last 50 years, North America lost a quarter of its birds — literally around 3 billion birds. So this is an urgent issue in terms of conservation and sustaining bird populations,” Simek says.
Valerie Osowski, a 2024 environmental sciences graduate who worked as an interpretive naturalist at the EIC while she was a student, is passionate about protecting wildlife and helped start Project PAT. She says it began with a simple observation. “We would get a lot of calls at the EIC about seeing birds that had collided with windows, seeing injured birds, seeing things happening, and not really knowing who to call or who to contact about it,” she says. Osowski, who now works at two metro Detroit nature centers, helped build the project from the ground up while working at the EIC. What started as an idea discussed among EIC and the Facilities Operations Sustainability Team eventually became a campuswide effort.
“It took a long time to be able to figure out what we needed to do, who we needed to talk to, how we could make this happen,” Osowski says. “It was a huge collaborative effort.” Today, Project PAT relies heavily on participation from faculty, staff, students and the surrounding community. During migration seasons in the spring and fall, volunteers walk the campus looking for bird-window collisions and submit reports that help identify problem areas.
For Annah Frost, a spring 2026 physics graduate and sustainable operations intern with Facilities Operations who helped lead Project PAT after Osowski’s graduation, the project changed the way she experienced campus. “Once I knew about this program, and it was actively on my mind, I saw the impact our infrastructure was having on local bird populations,” she says.
The project has also become a way to connect students through hands-on environmental work. Volunteer walks and training sessions organized by the Student Sustainability Coalition and Planet Blue Ambassadors teach participants how to safely identify and report collisions.
Trainings and volunteer walks are expected to resume this fall, ahead of the fall migratory season. In the meantime, project leaders encourage students, faculty and staff to get involved by staying alert, especially during morning walks to class or work. If someone finds a bird that appears to have collided with a window, they can submit a report through the campus Bird-Window Collision form. If the bird is injured but alive, volunteers are encouraged to give it several minutes to recover and, if needed, contact the local bird rehabilitation organization listed in the form. If the bird has died, the EIC asks community members not to handle the bird themselves and instead report it so trained staff can recover the bird, identify the species and collect data.
One of the project’s biggest goals is identifying which campus buildings pose the greatest risk. Early data collection has already highlighted several areas of concern, including the CASL courtyard, the Daniel Little Building, the west side of the Engineering Lab Building facing Chancellor’s Pond and parts of the EIC. This data is already shaping changes across campus. With the help of a local Scouting America troop, the EIC installed a low-cost bird deterrent system using a lightweight rope called paracord spaced across windows to make glass more visible to birds on some of the highest-risk windows. Assistant Sustainability Programs Manager Grace Maves says the long-term goal is to make bird safety part of the university’s approach to future campus improvements — a goal that is already starting to take shape. As part of the recent renovation of the DLB, the Facilities Operations Planning and Construction department chose a bird-safe film for the windows in high-impact areas.
This work and the Bird City Michigan Campus designation recognize the university’s broader sustainability and community engagement efforts, which include a Bee Campus USA designation and the PolliNation Project, a student-led initiative that has installed insect hotels throughout Dearborn. Simek says these projects all underscore the responsibility that comes with maintaining one of the region’s most important urban habitats. “So much environmental stuff is like, ‘Is this going to make a difference?’” he says. “This is something very tangible.”
Article by Kathryn Bourlier Kronner. Photos by Matthew Stephens
