New ultraviolet glass technology saves birds lives

Creating new technology and improving existing technology is really all about making our lives better, although it doesn’t always work that way of course as sometimes gadgets, devices and even laptops are produced that give us absolutely zilch, but here’s something that really is worth a mention.

Each year it’s reckoned that up to one billion birds a year die from crashing into glass and that’s just in the US alone. In Europe the figure is estimated to be around 250,000 a day. Don’t ask me how they come up with these statistics or whether they’re accurate or not, but I think everyone knows the numbers are pretty huge.

The problem is, birds just don’t see the glass, but they do see the reflections of trees and other things in the glass and think they are flying into open space. Now a German company by the name of or Glaswerke Arnold or Arnold Glas has come up with an ingenious way to stop it.

They have produced Ornilux glass which has a crisscross ultraviolet coating embedded into it which we can’t really see but which the birds can see clearly as most birds are able to see the ultraviolet spectrum.

Arnold Glas first started producing Ornilux glass in 2006 but their latest version, called Ornilux Mikado, is a new and improved version and recently received the prestigious ‘red dot award’ for outstanding product design 2010 from the Design Zentrum Nordrhein Westfalen in Essen, Germany.

The interesting thing about this new glass technology is that it is already seen in nature. Orb-Spiders use this very same technique to keep the birds from flying into their webs by spinning ultraviolet reflecting silk.

Arnold Glass developed the new glass technology in collaboration with the Max Plank Institute for Ornithology. After they tested the glass, they now reckon that the Ornilux Mikado Glass, so called because when held up against a backlight it looks like a collection of Mikado Sticks, will reduce bird strike by up to 75 percent when compared to normal glass.

That means that potentially hundreds of millions of bird’s lives will be saved which is great.

Ok I’m now looking forward to the day that some geeky genius come up with an effective way to stop them off loading the contents of their digestive systems onto my windows? That would be awesome.