Four Fallen Warblers Live on Through Origami

Miles Wu will never forget the first time he saw an Indigo Bunting. This past May, as the 14-year-old was finishing his shift as a collision monitor with Project Safe Flight, he heard a thump; the brilliant bird hit a glassy Manhattan office building and fell to the ground right in front of him. “It was shocking and sad,” Wu recalls of the bunting. “But it was also really beautiful.”

The fraught moment inspired Wu to create this carefully folded origami scene, which memorializes four of the bird-strike victims he found during spring migration this year: the Indigo Bunting along with a Black-and-white Warbler, Black-throated Green Warbler, and White-throated Sparrow.

Wu has been folding origami for more than seven years—about half his life. He started in elementary school, folding simple ninja stars and other random knickknacks with his friends, and then began practicing more seriously after his aunt and cousins gave him an origami book as a gift. Two years ago, he took his practice to the next level and started designing his own origami patterns. By that time, he’d already been birding in Central Park for a couple years, so he developed a particular enthusiasm for crafting birds as well as insects. “They’re just really interesting subjects for folding because they have all these long appendages,” he says.

All of Wu’s avian designs start with a classic “bird base” with five flaps: a shorter one for the body and longer ones for the head, tail, and two wings. “After that, I can alter it and tweak it in different ways to match the specific type of bird,” he says. For this Aviary piece, he chose a thicker paper, adjusting the folds to change the shape of feathers on the wings and how they lay, and filled in the details of the songbirds’ plumage with colored pencils. Wu then mounted the four birds on paper-covered foam, placing them against a photographic backdrop of buildings he monitors at Bryant Park.

The birds represent just a few of the many migratory species and residents that risk colliding with New York’s skyscrapers. As birds pass through the city, they can become disoriented by buildings’ artificial lights and their glassy windows that reflect trees and sky. Migratory birds, Wu points out, are extra vulnerable because they’ve been flying long distances and may be especially fatigued.

Wu knows these dangers well: This was his second year volunteering with Project Safe Flight, a program run by the NYC Bird Alliance. Every Sunday during spring and fall migration, Wu wakes before 7 a.m. to head to Bryant Park, patrolling for birds that have been injured or killed in building collisions. Live birds are taken to the Wild Bird Fund, a rehabilitation center in the city, for care. (Wu found just one live bird this past spring, a Brown Creeper.) Deceased birds are collected and donated to the American Museum of Natural History’s ornithology collection. One bittersweet reality for Wu, as quite a young birder, is that he’s seen many species for the first time only after they’ve collided with buildings. “A lot of them were lifers, even though they were dead,” he says.

The efforts of Wu and other collision monitors help furnish important data on the toll of building strikes. For example, the NYC Bird Alliance estimates that somewhere between 90,000 and 230,000 birds are killed in window collisions in New York City every year. Advocates use these data to help push building owners and policymakers to support bird-safe changes, such as turning off lights at night and adding patterns that make windows easier for birds to see.

Meanwhile, Wu hopes his art can offer another way to raise awareness. “I thought this piece would be like a tribute to all the birds from Project Safe Flight,” he says.

This story originally ran in the Fall 2026 issue. To receive our print magazine, become a member by making a donation today.