This Durham Home Is Maine’s First Bird-Safe Residential Building | Down East Magazine

Oct 14, 2024

Bird lovers Jeannette and Derek Lovitch installed acid-etched windows to prevent window strikes.

The moment Jeannette and Derek Lovitch laid eyes on their 78 acres of woods and wetlands, in Durham, they knew they’d found their bird sanctuary. “It’s lowland with a lot of cherry trees, a habitat that’s really good for birds,” Derek says. “We wanted to live where the birds already were.” The Lovitches are biologists and the owners of Freeport Wild Bird Supply, where picture windows frame a small native-plant garden and feeders that attract dozens of birds a day. They preferred a home with an even wilder view, and, in 2022, they hired Matt Maiello and Austin Smith (a birder Derek met at the store), of Portland’s Scott Simons Architects, to bring their vision to life. Now, the couple’s 2,000-square-foot modern abode features a soaring great room with 14-foot-tall columns of windows forming two panoramic viewing corners. They face a garden with native plants that attract hummingbirds, such as jewelweed and obedient plants, plus a dozen feeders, nine birdhouses, two bat houses, a birdbath, and a pond the couple dug to entice waterbirds. “But the more birds you attract to your yard, the more likely they are to come into contact with glass,” Derek says. “We wanted to look at the birds and not worry about them hitting the windows.”

Every year in the United States, as many as a billion birds are killed in collisions with windows, mistaking reflections for sky or trees. A simple way to protect them is to leave screens up year-round or to apply a patterned adhesive film to windows that reads as a barrier to birds. Neither option appealed to the Lovitches. “We didn’t want someone, if we had to sell the house, to be able to take it off,” Derek says. So the couple sourced glass with acid-etched stripes that break up reflections for the majority of their windows. To allow for unobstructed views in the great room, they installed pricier lower windows with ultraviolet reflective patterns that are supposed to be visible to birds but transparent to the human eye. One morning, though, the couple watched in horror as a dark-eyed junco flew straight into the glass and died. In the ensuing months, four more birds met the same fate. “It was like, ‘Oh my god, we built a death trap,’” Derek says. While they save up for etched-glass replacements, the Lovitches have covered the offending windows with adhesive film scattered with white dots, and there haven’t been any further incidents. This spring, Bird-Safe Maine declared the home “Maine’s first bird-safe residential building” and honored the Lovitches with its residential-excellence award.

The Lovitches’ home features windows with acid-etched stripes from Walker Glass. In the great room, the lower windows are covered with adhesive film strewn with white dots from FeatherFriendly. Both products make glass visible to birds, helping to prevent collisions.

A summer day at the house indeed feels like visiting a bird sanctuary. The couple has logged sightings of more than 150 species, which fill the forest with chirping songs and dive in carefree arcs around the house, coming so close to the windows their wingtips seem to skim the glass. Inside, the couple beholds the spectacle from a pair of armchairs in their viewing corner, a set of binoculars between them. It’s how they met two decades ago, as a pair of young biologists on a field study observing avian behavior. They like their view here even more. “We don’t have to get in our car and burn fuel to look at birds every day,” Derek says. “We’re extremely happy.”