What stadium builders need to know about how birds see the world

Light invisible to the human eye may be the key to making the new Vikings stadium safer for birds.

The team and the Minnesota Sports Facilities Authority said this week that they asked 3M to come up with a treatment for the glass on the new facility that would prevent bird collisions.

Glass strikes are thought to kill hundreds of millions of birds a year around the U.S., according to Christine Sheppard, a bird collision expert with the Virginia-based American Bird Conservancy.

But a film with a special ultraviolet coating could help birds recognize glass as a barrier.

"There are differences in the way bird sees the world," Sheppard told MPR's Morning Edition program. "Birds actually can see into the ultra violet. They can see colors that humans can't. So this gives rise to the possibility of creating something that has a pattern in the ultraviolet that would warn birds ... but it wouldn't be something that humans would notice."

Officials with 3M said they don't have such a product right now.

But Sheppard says she's seen a prototype from another company, and actually tested it herself.

"That company has never produced that material commercially, but the tests showed that the potential is very high as a potential solution," she said.

She says the film shouldn't change the light coming through glass on a stadium like the one being built in Minneapolis.

And if it works, it could be a transformational development for birds and architecture, Sheppard says.

"What we're talking about here is something that could be used to retrofit existing glass, and that's incredibly important," she says. "We need a tool that we can treat existing glass with, and window film is one of the easiest ways to do that ... it goes up like wallpaper."