New glass technology stops birds from splattering against your clean windows

It’s a standard cartoon trope: a freshly cleaned window, a stupid bird just minding his own business, and then — ka-blammo — fresh, dashed-out bird brains streaking down the pane.

This really does happen. I speak as the owner of a particularly stupid bird, Humbert J. Humbird, who has never met a window he doesn’t delight in smashing into, beak first, with a sudden and alarmed squawk.

Short of fitting him with some sort of tiny sonar helmet, I’ve never been quite sure what to do to remedy poor Humbert’s problem… until now. Courtesy of Arnold Glas comes Ornilux, a new type of glass that makes it visible to birds but totally transparent to humans.

Here’s how it works: Ornilux is coated with a special layer of UB material that is totally invisible to the human eye, but since bird’s eyes work at different wavelengths, they see a criss-crossed pattern modeled after a spider’s webs (which birds instinctively avoid)… making even the cleanest window easily avoidable to the stupid bird brain out there.

This might seem like a silly solution to a dumb problem, but it’s actually serious: 100 million birds per year die in the States by smacking into a window. I actually lost a pet parakeet myself when I was a kid because it flew into a window. It’s actually not the impact that does them in: usually, birds who smack into windows are physically fine. Rather, in most of these deaths, the birds expire from the shock.

In other words, this is our favorite kind of gadget: one with a practical purpose that stops suffering and makes the world a better place, at least for birds and bird lovers. Pigeon haters who malevolently keep their windows clean might want to stay away, though.