Making Paideia Safer for Our Feathery Friends

10th-grader Caleb Andrews ’28 has always been interested in nature, but his passion for birding didn’t develop until 7th grade when he started at Paideia and joined Tom Painting’s Junior High Bird Club. “In the birding community, there’s a term – spark bird – which describes the first bird that really intrigues you, and for me that was the barred owl. I mimicked its call and it came up maybe 12 feet away from me,” Caleb remembers.

Since his introduction to birding, Caleb’s interest has turned into activism. He began volunteering at banding stations where researchers identify birds, recording their age, gender and physical condition, before fastening a small metal band around their leg, which acts as a name tag or social security number for the bird. While banding in Maryland, Caleb first learned about bird strike prevention. The term bird strike refers to a bird’s collision with a window because it cannot differentiate the glass from the outdoors. “I started doing more research and learned that about 2.5 billion birds die each year due to window collision,” Caleb explains. 

In October, Caleb mentioned to High School and Junior High librarian Kristi Hovington that the windows in the library were susceptible to bird strike. “He asked if there was anything we could do in the library to reduce bird injuries and deaths,” Kristi recalls. With Caleb’s help, Kristi began researching solutions, in particular decals from the National Audubon Society, the nation’s experts in bird safety and preservation. The anti-collision decals are adhesives that birds can see from the outside, and they are proven to reduce bird strikes by 95-98%. “I thought this would be the best solution for the library because they are not super intrusive to the human view while protecting the birds,” Kristi explains. 

Caleb and Kristi put together a proposal for director of facilities Emma Morahan to see if the anti-collision decals were something the facilities team would be able to cover. “Emma was very impressed with Caleb’s initiative and her team was happy to help,” says Kristi. Six weeks after Caleb’s initial inquiry, a contractor installed the decals in the High School library. “It hasn’t really impacted our space at all, outside of student and faculty curiosity, which has given Caleb a real place to shine,” Kristi shares. “It’s just great knowing that we are protecting birds and helping the environment.” While the addition of the decals has not drastically changed the library for the humans, it has had a major impact on the birds. “Recently, I spotted a flock of robins in the trees outside of the library,” Caleb recounts, “and I watched as one of the robins caught sight of the decal and changed its course.”

The impact of Caleb’s work stretches beyond Paideia. When the Georgia Ornithology Society learned about this project, they appreciated Caleb’s efforts to protect birds within our community so much that they decided to fundraise to install anti-collision decals on the windows in Paideia’s Elementary library for free. Caleb hopes that even more anti-collision decals can be added across campus. “My goal is to get more people involved and to create a spreadsheet to track bird strikes on campus, so we can collect data about which windows on campus are high risk,” he shares. “I hope that by the time I graduate in 2028, we can identify these areas, so we can add decals and make our campus safer for birds.”