This Rail got railed...

I had to drop off some training manuals at our sister building next door early this morning. I arrived at 7:15 or so to the lovely glass entryway to this Corporate building in a very Corporate part of town. I noticed something beside the doorway. Upon a closer look... lo and behold it was a poor dead Virginia Rail. Without a doubt, it never really saw the lovely two story glass front of the building. It probably saw the lovely two story Ficus trees and sailed clear into the window. Poor little fella.

So how did it get there? Virginia Rails are not year-round residents in this part of NJ. They are short-distance migrants. There's a small freshwater marsh down the road and a small creek next to the office building. I'm thinking he most likely spent yesterday or maybe the past several days hanging in one of these places dining on insects, larvae, and frogs while getting ready for the next leg of his journey to a much nicer large marsh. Rails migrate at night, so that's when he probably crashed.

This isn't the first dead bird I've found here at my office. I've seen dead Cardinals, Titmice, Catbirds, and even a Nashville Warbler. So what can I do about it? There are lots of ways to prevent window strikes at home or in corporate settings. I'm planning on asking our building maintenance people to put up bird deterrent stickers or something like CollidEscape. Hopefully, if there is no aesthetic impact, they will be willing to do it. I do work for a company that is very pro-environment, so that's a good thing.