A bird hit my window. Is it going to be okay?
The short answer
Put it in a ventilated cardboard box or an unwaxed paper bag, somewhere warm, dark and quiet, and leave it alone for about an hour. No food. No water. Do not open the box to check — listen instead.
If it is standing and fluttering strongly after an hour, take the closed box outside, open it, and step back. If it is not, or if you see any of the red flags below, it needs a rehabilitator.
Why this is worth taking seriously
Window collisions kill an estimated 599 million birds a year in the United States, and the surprise is where. About forty-four percent of that happens at ordinary houses one to three stories tall. High-rises get the headlines and account for well under one percent. This is a backyard problem.
Roughly eight in ten birds fly off after hitting a window, which is why most people conclude it was fine. Often it was not. A 2024 study of collision victims brought into rehabilitation centers found that about sixty percent died anyway, even with veterinary care — and a third of those died the same day they arrived.
What kills them later is what you cannot see: bleeding inside the skull, brain swelling that progresses over hours, eye damage that leaves the bird functionally blind, a coracoid or wishbone fracture that stops it feeding or escaping. A necropsy study of birds killed by glass found fractures, bruising and cranial hemorrhage as the main injuries, and concluded that looking at a bird from the outside tells you very little about the damage inside it.
We are not telling you this to make you feel bad about your windows. We are telling you because “it flew away, so it was fine” is the assumption that stops people calling.
The box protocol
Ventilated cardboard box or an unwaxed paper bag. Never a wire cage — it damages feathers — and never anything transparent, because being able to see out keeps the bird in a panic.
Roll a paper towel into a donut and put it in the bottom so the bird has something to grip.
Close the lid. Put it in a warm, quiet room away from people, pets, television and music.
Check by listening, not by looking. If it recovers you will hear it moving and fluttering.
Wait thirty to sixty minutes.
To release, carry the closed box outside first, then open it and step well back. Never open it indoors.
Do not give it food or water. A concussed bird has an impaired swallow reflex, so liquid in the mouth goes into the airway and the bird effectively drowns. Water spilled on feathers destroys their insulation and drops the body temperature of an animal already in shock. And handling it to try is itself another dose of stress. Leave the box closed.
Red flags — it needs a rehabilitator now
Bleeding, or blood at the nostrils, mouth or ears.
One pupil noticeably larger than the other.
Head tilted to one side, circling, tremors, or eyes flicking back and forth.
One wing held differently from the other, or drooping.
Lying on its side or back, or unable to hold its head up.
Cannot grip — its feet will not close around your finger or a rolled towel.
Still cannot stand after fifteen or twenty minutes, or has not fully recovered after an hour in the box.
Any contact with a cat or dog, whether or not you can see a wound.
That last one is absolute. Cat saliva carries bacteria that are lethal to birds within a couple of days without antibiotics, and the puncture wound seals over and looks like nothing.
Honest caveat: even a bird that recovers and flies off may be carrying an injury you cannot see. Releasing after an hour is a judgment call, not a guarantee. If you are in any doubt, call.
Memphis sits on the Mississippi Flyway
About forty percent of North America's waterfowl migrate along this corridor, and the river works as a leading line for songbirds moving at night. On a good night in September, hundreds of thousands of birds cross Shelby County in the dark. Cornell's BirdCast dashboard will show you your own county's numbers, and it is worth looking at once just to understand the scale of what passes over your house.
Peak spring migration through Memphis runs roughly April 27 to May 14. Fall is broader — late August through October, heaviest in September.
Collisions spike then for reasons that compound. There are simply more birds. Many are first-year juveniles who have never navigated a city and are overrepresented among collision victims. Night migrants get drawn into lit areas, then hit reflective glass at dawn while foraging in a place they have no map of.
One local correction worth making: it is not only a migration problem. The nearest good study geographically, out of Oklahoma, found the highest monthly collision total in May, with a quarter to a third of late-spring casualties being recently fledged local juveniles. Fledgling season is its own spike, and those are your neighborhood's birds.
How to actually stop it
You need to break up the reflection on the outside of the glass. Birds do not see glass; they see a reflected tree, or straight through to a plant on the other side.
The current standard from American Bird Conservancy is markings no more than two inches apart in every direction — the two-by-two rule. You will still find older sources saying two by four inches. That guidance is out of date; four-inch vertical gaps let hummingbirds through. Dots should be at least a quarter inch, lines at least an eighth of an inch.
It has to go on the outside. Markers applied inside the glass are largely invisible to a bird when the outer surface is reflecting daylight.
External insect screens. The cheapest effective fix if you already have the tracks. They kill the reflection entirely and cushion anything that still hits.
Hanging paracord, spaced about four inches apart outside the glass. Effective, cheap, and less obtrusive than it sounds. The wider spacing works here because the cords are three-dimensional and move in the wind.
Dot-patterned exterior film or tape, applied on the two-inch grid. Lasts years.
Tempera paint or bar soap on the outside of the glass, on the same grid. Free, non-toxic, and fine as a temporary fix on a problem window.
Move bird feeders either well away from the window, or to within a foot or two of it, so birds cannot build up enough speed to be hurt.
What does not work is a single hawk silhouette decal. This has been tested repeatedly and found ineffective. The shape is irrelevant — birds do not read a sticker as a predator. Coverage density is the only thing that matters, and one decal leaves the rest of the pane looking passable. The same goes for owl decoys, wind chimes and blinking lights.
Ultraviolet-only decals are inconsistent. Some common birds, mourning doves among them, cannot see ultraviolet at all.
Turning off lights at night genuinely helps, but it solves a different problem. A study using two decades of collision data from a single Chicago building found that halving the lighted window area cut collisions there elevenfold in spring and sixfold in fall. That is about night-flying migrants being drawn off course by lit buildings. It will not stop the cardinal hitting your kitchen window at ten in the morning — that is a daytime reflection, and only markers on the glass fix it. Do both; they are different problems.
The legal part, briefly
Nearly every native bird in your yard is protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act — cardinals, warblers, thrushes, woodpeckers, hummingbirds. It is illegal to keep one, alive or dead, without a federal permit. House sparrows, starlings and pigeons are the exceptions.
What you may do without any permit is take possession of a sick or injured bird for immediate transport to a permitted rehabilitator or a veterinarian. That is the whole authorization. There is no version of it that covers keeping the bird until it seems better.
And practically: if licensed hospitals with radiographs and pain control lose sixty percent of these birds, a shoebox on the porch loses nearly all of them.
Who we are
Out of the Woods Wildlife Rescue & Rehab is a wildlife rehabilitation nonprofit in Memphis, permitted by the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency. If a bird hit your window and you are looking at it right now, text 901-340-6534.
If you find yourself doing this more than once or twice a year, treat the window rather than the bird. It is one afternoon's work and it stops the whole problem.
Sources: Loss et al. 2014, The Condor. Kornreich et al. 2024, PLOS ONE. Klem 1990, Journal of Field Ornithology. Van Doren et al. 2021, PNAS. Riding, O'Connell and Loss 2021, Scientific Reports. American Bird Conservancy, Preventing Bird Collisions with Glass. Cornell Lab BirdCast. International Wildlife Rehabilitation Council. 50 CFR 21.76.
We are wildlife rehabilitators, not veterinarians or lawyers.