At around 6:30 a.m. on a Thursday morning in downtown Winston-Salem. The sky is still dark, but mother-nature is beginning a new day.

“That’s a thrasher calling with that harsh sound. The cardinals are waking up too,” says Kim Brand, Vice President of the Audubon Society of Forsyth County.

Since August 2011, Brand along with several volunteers have been researching bird collisions in the city’s downtown.

“Thirty-two dead and nine injured in the spring and last fall in just one month we found 42 dead and 11 injured. The birds that we find are just a portion of the birds found. There are building ledges, scavengers, street sweepers and people cleaning up the buildings, says Brand.

Brand is also an ornithologist. She says each year, between 100 million to 1 billion birds in the United States are killed by crashing into buildings collisions each year, or about 1 to 10 deaths per building.

Migratory song birds fly at night, using the moon and stars to guide them. The lighting on the skyscrapers confuses the birds. Many hit windows as they see the sky, water or trees reflected in the glass. Allison Sloan has been collecting data on bird collisions in downtown Winston-Salem since 2008.

“Migratory birds are attracted to the light and are reluctant to leave the light much like moths are at a porch light. They can fly around the lit structure from hours and become exhausted and drop to the ground. They can die from crashing directly into the light source or from crashing into the windows in the morning,” says Sloan.

Brand and Sloan often carry brown paper bags with air holes to capture injured birds on city streets.

“Sometimes birds are stunned and they need to rest for a few hours,” says Brand.

Birds that don't need treatment are released in a safe wooded area around the city.

The dead birds in Winston-Salem are collected under a federal permit. They are being sent to the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh for further research.

“We record date and exact location which allows them to use the birds for research purposes, so we get information that is otherwise hard to get and that is valuable information for geographic differences in bird populations.  They can also measure the hard parts of the bird like the beak and the leg size,” says Brand.

As we walk along First Street, a feather print and bird waste on the Park building are more signs of bird collisions. The Audubon Society says most of the migratory songbirds they have found are in decline, including the Wood Thrush, and the Black and White Warbler because of deforestation and other issues.

Sloan moved to the Triad six years ago from New York City, where she monitored bird collisions at the World Trade Center. She worked with the city’s Audubon society to help create a Lights Out program for large buildings.

Now she is partnering with the Audubon Society of Forsyth County to create a similar program in downtown Winston-Salem.

“This is the Liberty Plaza building. This is one of our biggest success stories so far in the lights out program because this building use to stay flood lit from the bottom floors all night long.  We used to find a number of birds pretty regularly and we haven’t found any since the lights went out,” says Sloan.

The Lights Out Program asks building owners to turn off their interior and decorative exterior lights after 11 pm from March 15 through May 31 and from August 15 through November 15.

So far, five downtown buildings are participating: Wells Fargo, Winston Tower, Liberty Plaza, Reynolds American and the R.J. Reynolds building.   David Shannon, president of JDL Castle Corporation in Winston Tower says the changes are also good for business.

“There are going to be some energy savings because we turn the lights off at an earlier time than we normally would have. It’s hard to quantify exactly what that is but there are some because anytime you reduce your light usage you reduce your electrical usage,” says Shannon.

One study in Chicago showed that turning out the lights reduced bird collisions by about 80 percent. Brand encourages architects to incorporate building materials that will help reduce daytime collisions as well.

“There is now a LEED pilot credit for bird friendly building design, so I would like architects to know that is an option. They can design bird friendly buildings and get LEED credit for it,” says Brand.

Meanwhile, Audubon members and volunteers in Charlotte and Greensboro are also working on programs to monitor bird collisions in their cities.

For things that you can do to make your home more bird friendly, visit the Audubon Society of Forsyth County at http://www.forsythaudubon.org/ .