About BirdSafe Rapid City
Who we are
BirdSafe Rapid City is a volunteer effort started by a small group of neighbors who kept finding stunned or dead songbirds beneath the same windows around town. We are not a chapter of a national group and we are not biologists by trade — just residents of the Black Hills who noticed a solvable problem and decided to do something about it. Our work is entirely local: every report we collect, every window we help treat, and every volunteer route we walk is here in Rapid City and the surrounding Black Hills.
We keep our focus narrow on purpose. Habitat loss, outdoor cats, and climate change all take a toll on wildlife, but window strikes are a hazard we can actually fix, one pane of glass at a time, with tools that already exist. That is the piece of the puzzle we have chosen to own.
Why windows are a problem for birds
A bird in flight is reading its surroundings the way we do — by sight. The trouble is that glass doesn’t give birds anything to read. A clear pane looks like open air straight through to whatever is on the other side, and a reflective one shows a perfect mirror image of sky, trees, or shrubs that looks just as real as the landscape around it. Either way, the bird has no reason to believe anything is there until it hits it.
This isn’t a rare event or a one-building problem. It happens at homes, offices, and storefronts across Rapid City, and it happens to common backyard species as often as it happens to anything unusual passing through during migration. Most of the fixes are simple: breaking up reflections with film, dots, or screens on the outside of the glass, moving feeders closer to windows instead of farther away, and dimming unnecessary lighting during spring and fall migration.
What we do
We track collisions around Rapid City by asking residents to report what they find, so we can see which buildings and windows are the worst repeat offenders. We share practical, low-cost ways to make a window bird-safe, and we work with property owners who want help figuring out where to start. None of this requires special equipment or expertise — it just takes people willing to look down at the base of a window and say something.
If you’ve found a bird near a window, or you want to help make your own home safer, visit our reporting page or browse the resources page for window-treatment options.