Barry Kent MacKay recalls

a night some 20 years ago when the Toronto Dominion tower was completely dark, a black monolith rising from the concrete, its upper storeys shrouded in dense fog. From this black wall one solitary light shone hundreds of feet above the ground. Directly below that light a thrush lay dead upon the pavement.


Barry MacKay and his mother Phyllis were among the first to recognize that the tall buildings being constructed in Toronto would pose a major threat to migratory birds. In fact they'd known about the problem of night-migrating birds hitting lit structures since the late 1950s. At that time Fran Westman was picking up dead birds that had crashed into the TV tower in Barrie and sending them to the Royal Ontario Museum. But they had no idea how many birds were affected by this phenomenon until they began visiting the CFTO tower built in Agincourt in the early '60s. To their horror they discovered that huge numbers would hit the tower, especially on bad-weather nights, and up to a third of them were still living.

Phyllis MacKay, who had always done whatever she could for injured animals, now began to focus on the rehabilitation of these songbirds. And together with her son she began making nightly forays downtown when the Toronto Dominion Centre was built in 1967.

As if the TD alone wasn't bad enough, with lights glimmering from an all-black structure like stars in a night sky, more towers began popping up, increasing the likelihood that migrating birds would be stopped dead in their tracks. The ever-larger number of office towers clustered in a small area meant that once the birds were down, they would be faced with the well-nigh impossible task of finding a way out of a maze of glass, steel and concrete.

But the worst of it was when the CN Tower, the world's tallest free-standing structure, went up. It was built in a process called continuous concrete which required round-the-clock work and extremely bright illumination. Light poured out into the surrounding atmosphere, clearly visible across the lake, and night migrants were hitting the structure by the thousands. No bird rescuers were allowed onto the site but a couple of kids in their early teens, Mike Butler and Eric Miller, snuck onto the grounds and watched as workmen hauled wheelbarrows full of dead songbirds home for tomorrow's dinner.

Obviously shaken by the bird deaths, CN Tower officials wanted to rectify the situation once the tower was built. They consulted a well-known ornithologist who assured them that as long as lights were not shining out into the night sky the birds would avoid the building. Barry was fairly certain that this was not the case but was unable to convince CN to turn all the lights out until one night in August when there was a massive kill. The following evening he looked out of his apartment in Thorncliffe Park and he could not see the CN Tower - the lights were out. "My God," he thought, "I've actually made a difference!"

But the office towers continued to be a cause of bird mortality. The biggest hurdle was the general feeling among building managers that it was beyond their ability to solve. In 1981, frustrated at the lack of response, Phil Desjardins founded the Toronto City Naturalists. The group formed an alliance with World Wildlife Fund - Canada which agreed to produce posters that would grace the elevators of the tall buildings. The following year 100 posters - a drawing of a bird peering at its reflection in a window with an office tower looming behind - went up in the buildings. And the group printed a pamphlet entitled "You've come a long way, Birdy, for a smash hit", handing one to every person who walked into the Toronto Dominion Centre. The result: a measurable reduction in lighting and fewer bird deaths, but still no permanent solution to the problem.

Other tactics have been tried. Barry, who is a nature columnist for the Toronto Star, wrote bitterly about the issue after a total of 10,000 birds died at Ontario Hydro's Lennox generating station in Kingston during three consecutive nights in September of 1981. The top 50 feet of the plant's immense stacks had been floodlit, ostensibly to prevent planes from crashing into them. Flashing red strobes, safe for birds and planes, proved a much more sensible solution, and after that calamity, were quickly installed.

Derided for "picking mushrooms" in the early days at the CFTO tower site, Barry and Phyllis turned radical and dumped a pile of dead birds onto the security desk. This prompted immediate action. With structures where a handful of people at most make the decisions about turning lights on or off, it's much easier to obtain the desired results. With multiple-tenant buildings like Toronto's office towers the issue becomes more complex, and to date a total black-out has eluded many a disheartened activist.

And yet, as each heartbroken person burns out and walks away, another always steps in to take their place. And no one ever forgets. Eric Miller, who left Toronto in 1990 to attend graduate school, recently wrote an essay entitled "A Thousand Shapes of Death" which appears in the newly published book Open City. In it Eric connects his experiences of dying birds with the death of his mother. He speaks of a male Rose-breasted Grosbeak which had hit the Commerce Court tower. "Now he pulsed and gasped, half-paralytic in a shoebox on top of soft dish-towels....My grosbeak had suffered permanent brain damage. He would not take water or food, but neither would he die. Instead he convulsed with quiet vigour through a long day. I couldn't stand his repetitive pain, and yet I kept hoping that the bird would recover." Finally, no longer able to endure, Eric lay the grosbeak down on a slab of concrete and caved his head in with a brick.

Though all who have prowled the downtown streets of Toronto did so from a good heart, some have had another motive - they may have wanted corpses for taxidermy or painting...or to fill the holes in their lives. Such a one was "the Scuttler". This highly emotional, extremely volatile old man would scoop up any birds he found, kiss and hug them, feeding them bread and water which more often than not they refused to take. When they died he would wrap them in toilet paper and place them in little coffins. If confronted, he would counter - in his broken English - that the birds "pleasured" him. He was finally persuaded to take the live ones to the local cemetery and release them, or give them up to Phyllis MacKay who, he eventually came to understand, really did know how to minister to their needs.

Others learned by trial and error. Frank de Matteis, a wildlife artist who would bicycle downtown to rescue birds, thought that insectivorous birds might be willing to eat protein pellets. He wanted to keep a couple of Common Yellowthroats happy and healthy for a few hours while he sketched them. So he put them in a sun room filled with plants and fed them this "dead" food. The warblers would have none of it. But when a neighbour, Maria Price, released a jar full of fruit flies purloined from her science class into the room, the birds pounced on the flies and devoured them.

As the generations of bird rescuers succeed one another, we learn from each other's experiences and each other's mistakes. Michael Mesure began rescuing birds in the late '80s, using Barry's technique of popping the live birds into paper bags for safe and relatively stress-free delivery to their release site. But Mike added a twist of his own. Instead of recording information about the bird and place of retrieval on a piece of paper, having to juggle pen and paper with often-cold hands, he determined to use a tiny tape recorder. This allowed him to move more quickly through the financial district, rescue more birds and maintain statistics. The stats would prove invaluable when Mike approached tower managers to coax them into turning the lights out. But his one-man operation could only do so much.

In 1993 Mike and half a dozen fellow bird rescuers formed an organization called the Fatal Light Awareness Program or FLAP. By banding together into an official charity, we believed it would give us more clout when dealing with building management and greater credibility among environment groups who might be willing to work with us on the issue. It also enabled us to solicit more help with the rescue effort, and ask corporations, governments and funding agencies for money to further our work.

Like the ripples a stone creates when it hits the water, so too has our work had many repercussions, some of them delightfully unexpected. Many a homeowner and business - even the Bleecker Street Co-op - has called us to find out how to prevent birds from hitting their windows. Avian activists from other cities - Calgary, New York, Winnipeg, Vancouver to name but a few - have gleaned the gold from our experiences in Toronto to save their own birds. And another bird-loving teenager, Brendan Boyd, has organized a school patrol with a couple of friends. They go out around 6 on migration mornings and visit four schools in the Victoria Park / Kingston Road area in Toronto to ensure that birds which have hit the schools' windows get a second chance.

Even though many thousands of birds have been saved, the work continues, even accelerates. As our population grows, our built environment expands and the threats to birds from reflective windows and night lights in tall structures increase. We cannot give up the fight. And if our spirits need a bit of bolstering, we might chant this mantra, created by Barry Kent MacKay: "Dull light is better than strong light, red light is better than white light, and especially...no light is better than any light".

Irene Fedun