Today I Learned

FYI, not all bird glass has visible fritting. They also come with UV reflective coatings that are almost transparent to the human eye (unless you're really close to the glass), e.g.,

Some UV treatments are stripes, others similar to an elongated version of the fritting from OP, and then there's the camo-stick-like version above. Stripes are the most noticeable to humans.

ETA: From personal experience, the glass is completely transparent from ~2+ meters away, and you have to be very close or staring directly at glare from the sun to see it when <2m away.

ETA2: Someone else shared the Wikipedia article on bird collisions below, but I wanted to take a second to highlight this graph from the article:

If you think bird safe glass is cool, spaying/neutering your cats and keeping them inside or on a leash is waaay cooler.

(This graph doesn't include indirect causes of death like climate change, deforestation, and pesticide use, but that doesn't make responsible pet ownership any less cool)

My grandparents lived near an estuary and had to put the dot stickers on their big, west-facing sliding glass doors to stop the high-speed waterfowl crashes that would happen every month or so. While I certainly understand it’s best for the ducks, one of my oldest memories is of hearing a BANG! And looking out the door to see a disoriented duck staggering around on the deck before shaking it off and flying away unsteadily.

Worth it. Thank you smart people for saving what birds we can.

"look at all those bugs just sitting there! I'm going in"

But this occupies 0.001% of my visual field, just to save some wildlife?

More of this kind of regulation please.

You can also buy strips of those dots to put on existing windows. I have two glass doors on the back of my house that birds flew into so I spent an afternoon applying them and it's decreased enough that I haven't noticed it happening again, at least. They have been up for a few years without wear.

I had to put decals on the bottom of my glass door to keep my dumb dog from bonkin' his noggin.

Does it really work, or do birds still crash into the windows, misjudging the small dots for insects?

that's brilliant

We need these for Humans. I work in a building with a large public work space. It is in the corner of the building with three glass walls. The single door is in the middle of the glass wall. We have had so many people walking right into the glass that we had to put logos on the glass to keep people from doing it. We have one lady with a huge collection of security camera footage of all the people doing it.

I'm glad the cameras were not installed when I did that a few days after I started hooking up all the networking gear.

i hit a goose with a car once and i still mourn that moment.