NEWS · 6

BY ALISON SCHAFER

At a fancy condo building by the canal in Georgetown, everyone knows their job. Starting in early spring, people living on the ground floor with enclosed courtyards, look for new mallard nests. When the ducklings hatch, everyone swings into action. If the downstairs neighbors go out of town, the upstairs neighbors peer over their balconies, keeping an eye on the babies. Duck Watch volunteers get ready — the ducklings can’t fly, can’t get out of the fenced-in yards, and if they can’t get to water, they’ll die.

When the Duck Watch volunteers show up with crates to rescue the babies, even the mother ducks, who’ve been nesting at the building for several years, know their role. They follow. Then volunteers and building residents take the ducklings to a nearby release site and watch the family take their first group swim. They are architects, retired park rangers, government employees, and teachers, but that’s in their spare time. What they really do is rescue mother ducks and their babies, push to keep migratory and other birds safe in downtown’s glass canyons, and care for baby squirrels and bunnies.

This is City Wildlife, an organization dedicated to helping urban creatures, and right now it holds about 200 animals in peak spring season. “We have tons of baby birds, and turtles that were hit by cars, with broken shells, half a dozen or more baby rabbits, typically about half our wildlife are birds,” said Anne Lewis, who co-founded City Wildlife in 2008. “It’s really busy April through September and then it really drops off around November, and that’s when we get to do the administrative stuff and paint the office.” Now, though, City Wildlife is too busy rescuing the animals we Washingtonians live with. Lights Out DC and Duck Watch are two of City Wildlife’s most important projects. For Lights Out DC, volunteers go out in the early mornings to the 14 or so blocks between Union Station and the Convention Center to look for birds killed flying into buildings because they can’t see the glass. Lisbeth Fuisz, who teaches in English at Georgetown University in her spare time, runs Lights Out. “Yes, glass is beautiful and lit buildings are beautiful, but they’re deadly to birds. We have to understand there are consequences to that — what is beauty for humans is very detrimental to birds.” In the U.S. alone, as many as 988 million birds die annually from collisions with glass. Ducks at the Capitol reflecting pool, Washington D.C. Photo by Jeff Malet.

The D.C. City Council is currently considering a bill that would require all new or substantially remodeled buildings to use glass visible to birds. “It’s a weird thing,” said Fuisz. “You don’t want to find birds because you know they’re suffering and dying, but it’s good to do something.” Lights Out has been in talks with the MLK Library about changes to its facades, and the Convention Center put film with wavey lines over some glass that was particularly dangerous and, Fuisz says, Lights Outs saw “something like an 85 or 89 percent reduction in collisions there.”

“Ducks are really charismatic. It’s hard not to like them,” said April Linton, City Wildlife’s Duck Watch coordinator. She’s still working from home, but when she’s at the State Department’s Office of Foreign Assistance, she keeps a net and reflective vest near her desk for emergency duck calls. “I’d be dressed for the State Department, and I’d be out waving a net around the GW campus or whatever,” she said.

“I was always an animal person. I think I was born an animal person and I always had a fondness for waterfowl,” said Linton. “And when I am able to talk to people, answer questions about ducks or help them — I just think we have a responsibility to these animals and caring for them makes us better and better at caring for each other.”

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