Did you know Milwaukee is a city for the birds?
Bird City is a conservation program that brings folks together to create healthier communities for birds and people. And Milwaukee is just one of 82 official Bird Cities in Wisconsin.
Bryan Lenz is the Bird City Network director and Glass Collision program director for American Bird Conservancy. He says the first Bird City program began in Wisconsin and has since expanded across the country and internationally.
Bird City Wisconsin started operating as an independent program in 2009 and joined the Lake Michigan Bird Observatory in 2024.
Lake Effect’s Xcaret Nuñez spoke with Lenz, who’s also the steering committee chair for Bird City Wisconsin, for this month’s Chirp Chat to learn more about the program.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Anyone who has walked nature trails in Wisconsin has likely noticed the recognizable green and yellow Bird City Wisconsin signs, but I've always been curious what they stand for. Bryan, can you explain what a Bird City is?
A Bird City is a community that takes action to benefit birds, and when they do that, it makes the community better for both birds and people. I view Bird City as an action guide. There are a lot of people out there who aren't really happy with what they see happening in the natural world around them. They don't really know where to start, though. And Bird City is a set of tools and actions that anybody can put into place to be a conservationist where they live. You don't have to solve the world's problems yourself; you can solve them where you are.
Bird City is a program that originated in Wisconsin in 2009. Can you tell me more about how this program started and how it's evolved since then?
The initial idea came from a group that is now called the Wisconsin Bird Conservation Partnership, and way back in 2002, I believe, they had an urban habitat subcommittee that kind of started kicking around the idea of what it would look like if we took the Tree City USA model and made it for birds. Birds are really popular, so they figured they could ask a lot more. It took a number of years, as you mentioned, to get it off the ground. And Wisconsin's was first, and other states around us started kind of looking over the border and going, “That looks cool! I think I'd like to do that, too.” And so we kind of helped it grow organically. Wisconsin is a very birdy place with a bunch of people who really care about them. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service did a survey a number of years ago, which they do every five years, where they estimated how many people bird-watch in every state. And 33% of people in Wisconsin are into birds, which is the second highest in the country. So we've had a long history of ornithology and bird-watching.
You mentioned the Bird City program has expanded outside of Wisconsin, but how many communities in Wisconsin have been recognized as Bird Cities?
It ebbs and flows over the years. Right now, I believe we are at 82 [cities in Wisconsin] that are currently active. When I joined the American Bird Conservancy in 2018, I had two missions: One was to work on glass collisions, which kill a billion birds a year, and it's something that Bird City communities work on. And the second [mission] was to take Bird City and grow it. So we have our program coordinator, Joanna Eckles, who is in charge of taking the Bird City idea and seeing if we can get every state to have its own Bird City program. We do this whole thing with our partner, Environment for the Americas, which is the home of World Migratory Bird Day – another thing Bird City communities do – and they lead the international effort. So I believe we are up to 10 U.S. states at the moment, and Colombia, Brazil, Mexico – with the Caribbean and Panama coming soon.
What are some examples of projects that have come out of Bird City Wisconsin, that you're particularly proud of or that you share with other cities as an example to look at?
There are a number of things. One of the few requirements that we have is that every community hosts a World Migratory Bird Day event …It’s an annual conservation education event that has different themes, and Bird City is doing this in different ways. Some host a bird walk, some will set up at a festival and some will have a speaker. It's all things that wouldn't happen without this program. And every single year [in Wisconsin] we currently have 82 of those, so that makes a really big impact when you add those up.
Another example: The City of Madison passed the state's first bird-friendly building ordinance, which was great. Madison is a great Bird City, and they're working with the campus of UW-Madison on a lot of different collision activities.
One of the other things is that a billion birds a year die after hitting windows in the U.S. You can build new buildings so that doesn't happen, but even if you gave me every single new building and said, “Bryan, we'll build this exactly as you want,” we’ll still kill a billion birds a year until we've changed all of the glass. So the Urban Ecology Center has a team working on that in Milwaukee – monitoring and identifying the worst windows [for bird collisions] so we can ask to have them fixed.
Walk me through some of the steps it takes to become recognized as a Bird City community.
The first thing is to know about [Bird City] and know that you can do it and that it is for you, no matter who you are. Then we would say to check out the Bird City website, and it will give you a list of actions that we ask communities to take. And it is not a bunch of requirements. There are actions in habitat, reducing threats to birds, education and sustainability. And then within those four categories, there are a lot of options, and you pick the ones that are right for you. So once you feel it out, you can reach out to Bird City Wisconsin’s director, Kelsey Bell, by clicking on the “Contact Us” button on the website.
There are quite a few benefits that come with becoming a Bird City. One of them is just straight community pride. Everybody wants to be proud of the place they live. So the street signs, the recognition, we give you a website, flags and plaques, and you're now on a website that is hemisphere-wide, and so you're on the map if you're a Bird City. Birders spend money and travel, so we've also added a tourism map, too, so you can put in where to go birding, where to stay, and other attractions. In addition, it's good for birds. And anything that's good for birds is good for people. There's study after study that shows positive mental health benefits of green space and bird songs … Property values are also higher where there are more birds and where things are greener. So there are a lot of reasons to become a Bird City.
You can learn more about the Bird City Wisconsin program by visiting its website and the Lake Michigan Bird Observatory website.
Chirp Chat’s Bird of the Month for August
Adult Red-headed woodpeckers have entirely bright red heads, black backs with large white patches on their wings, and an entirely white underbelly. Male and female Red-headed woodpeckers largely look the same.
“There are people who confuse Red-headed woodpeckers with a couple of other woodpeckers, but once you've seen it, there's no confusing it with the other ones,” Lenz says. “It’s a bird that is getting less common every year and has really been declining in the state, and it's one of the most striking birds that I think we have in Wisconsin.”
