When news finally settled and it was determined that uOttawa, along with every other institution in Canada, was going to close its doors for an entire academic season, there were a lot of projects that were still ongoing. Fast forward to almost two years later and people are starting to come back to the campus, and those projects were completed. So let's take a quick tour of some of the sustainability things that happened on campus while you were gone! UCU Park Just behind the UCU (near the Pivik entrance) the land has been completely landscaped and a new park was created. The small park is a 4-season park with seating, a stone dust path, and a bunch of Indigenous, native, and edible plants. If you are in the garden at just the right time of the year, you can see the wild raspberries! Other improvements include a safer declined path to the building and an expanded terrace near the entrance doors (the former smokers pit) with a new seating area. Morisset Window Mural Safe Wings wor...

I don't think that I need to convince you that birds hitting windows and dying is a bad thing. Bird collisions with buildings is right at the top of the list of bird fatalities ( along with cats ), and with the huge decline of migratory birds in recent years, it makes sense that large institutions do what they can to help reduce collisions. So here is the first problem. There are no vertical transparent surfaces in nature, thus birds are completely unaware that they are about to hit a window. Birds are often confused because they see the reflection of a tree in the window and try to land on the tree. University campuses are usually covered in windows (modern buildings tend to have lots of windows to let in natural light and convey transparency... also they look cool). And, university campuses have a lot of trees. So mix these two things together and you get a lot of reflected trees causing bird collisions. The second problem has to do with the solutions, in that they are expensive....