Speaking Up for Birds: How Texans Can Say Yes to Bird Friendly Design

by Chloe Crumley, Engagement Manager, Audubon Texas

One of the most difficult moments of my work with Audubon came on a cool fall morning in 2023. I was walking the perimeter of a convention center, scanning the glass walls for bird strikes — hoping, as always, to find none. Then we came across a beautiful Yellow Warbler, still warm from flight, his first migration cut short against a pane of glass.

Moments like that remind us that statistics — up to a billion birds lost each year in the U.S. to window collisions — represent real, living creatures. But they also remind us that we have the power to change the outcome.

Right now, six major Texas cities — San Antonio, Austin, Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, and South Padre Island — are planning or redesigning their convention centers. Each of these projects presents a chance to make choices that value both people and wildlife. Sitting in the heart of the Central Flyway, Texas sees some of the most diverse bird species in the U.S. Yet three of our cities rank among the nation’s most dangerous for migratory birds due to nighttime collisions.

Audubon Texas is determined to change that. Across the state, we’re working with city leaders, architects, and community members to make bird-friendly design a standard feature of urban growth.

Across the state, we have seeing results. From the Traphene Hickman Library in Cedar Hill with 75% bird-friendly glass and 14,000 native plants to Rice University and the UT Marine Science Institute, institutions across Texas proving that bird-friendly glass and retrofits on windows works.

Now comes the opportunity for us to speak up for big changes—convention sized changes—and we need your help.

As our cities move along with designs for expanded convention centers, we are asking you to reach out to your city representative and request they use bird-friendly design. In fact, we have opportunities below for you to act today and speak up for birds:

1. Dallas Convention Center is currently in its design phase. If you’re a Dallas resident, you can send a message to your city council member today through Audubon.
2. Austin residents have a unique opportunity to say YES to new building code that would require all new buildings to implement bird-friendly glass for the first 100 feet. Now through January, we need Austinites to tell the Planning Commission and City Council to vote YES!
3. Texans, reach out to your city council member and remind them, “I bird, I vote!” Ask how your community can include bird-friendly design in upcoming projects or building codes.

If places like New York’s Javits Center and Chicago’s McCormick Place can transform from deadly structures into models of safe, sustainable design, so can we.

Every voice matters — and every pane of safe glass brings us closer to a future where Texas’s skylines are as life-giving as its landscapes.