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Cottage Q&A: Why is this bird attacking our windows?

A male American robin perched on a tree branch Photo by Shutterstock/Jukka Jantunen

I have a problem with a robin hitting our west-facing windows. This has been going on since the middle of April. We have tried everything: discs in the windows, blinds closed, etc. It hits at least 10 times a day from early morning to late afternoon, and still it lives. I assume it is the same bird. Is this bird sick?—F. Barnes, Huntsville, Ont.

Sick? No. But it’s possibly lovesick. (Hormone surges can cause bonkers behaviour. Heck, it’s happened to the best of us.) 

“This most certainly is an overly territorial male American robin attacking his ‘threatening’ reflection,” says Jody Allair of Birds Canada. Thankfully, “this tends to only happen during the height of the breeding season in the spring,” he says. So the behaviour should stop. But the situation is stressful and annoying for you, and it’s really stressful and annoying for the bird. He’s fighting a battle that he can never win. 

Wild Profile: Meet the American robin

Your strategies to stop the window smashing probably didn’t eliminate the behaviour because they didn’t completely eliminate the bird’s reflection, says Chris Earley, an interpretive biologist at the University of Guelph’s Arboretum. “Sometimes, closing curtains does work, but not usually. It sort of depends on how clear the reflection is, and that changes with each situation,” he says. “We have a cardinal that has been attacking a window at The Arboretum Centre for at least three breeding seasons now. Our best solution is putting a mounted red-tailed hawk by the window. Then the cardinal goes away.” 

Wild Profile: Meet the Northern cardinal

Problem…not solved, because you probably don’t own a taxidermied bird of prey. The folks at the Fatal Light Awareness Program Canada have suggestions for temporarily eliminating a window’s reflection—hanging something over the exterior of the window, or rubbing a bar of soap all over it, to make it opaque, for example. Yes, you’ll lose your view and the windows will look weird for a while, but you also won’t have a bird thudding into them 10 times a day. Better yet, you could use a permanent window film to prevent both bird attacks and accidental bird collisions; see this this Cottage Q&A from our May ’21 issue.

Got a question for Cottage Q&A? Send it to answers@cottagelife.com.

This article was originally published in the May 2025 issue of Cottage Life.

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