Whatever Wednesday…

Many of you have already seen this picture already but I have a follow up!

If you haven’t yet….

We were watching tv last week and there was this HUGE thud sound. We ran outside to see what it was. It sounded like a large rock had hit our window (we live in a loft style town-home with large windows on one wall). There wasn’t anything outside so we looked up and thought there was something on the window – so we went inside and saw this.



























A fully detailed imprint of a bird.

SO WEIRD!

But no bird...

It was so bizarre that I looked it up and found an answer to the phenomenon.

I found this article – Gorgeous, Gruesome Reminders to Bird Proof Your WIndows and apparently, there’s even a Flickr group – Bird Imprints on glass.

The explanation is pretty interesting and depends on the bird species that crashed into the window. 

“The “level of detail generally has to do with the birds’ species. Imprints are made of dust from “powder down”—a type of feather that, rather than growing to a certain size and then falling out, disintegrates from the tip downwards.

“They form this oily powder,” says Homayoun. Only certain bird families produce powder down, which explains why, despite the diversity of birds who meet their deaths via window, pigeons and doves tend to be the ones that leave a mark.”

I thought our imprint looked like an owl shape and after some research, they are one of the species that “powder-down” & we have quite a bit of wildlife and bird variety out here.

They imprint is still there - still no sign of a dead or injured bird.

I figured I would share since so many of you were as curious as I was.

Sadly, it wasn't the new symbol for The Hunger Games prequel or a bird "covered in the burnt ashes of his enemies" (Lindsi's theory - this photo also spurred a strange late night texting convo of theories lol) but I still thought it was pretty cool!