Central College continued its commitment to environmental stewardship with the installation of a second student-designed sticker mural on the windows of the Roe Center on campus. 

The window, which faces north, has caused significant bird deaths for many years. Professor of Biology Russ Benedict and Professor of Art Mathew Kelly collaborated with students in the biology and art programs to create and design CollidEscape stickers for this window. According to Benedict, bird populations are dwindling across the United States and one of the leading causes is collisions with windows.

“There’s a number of different problems that are causing their decline, one of those is collisions with windows. And so, that’s why I really wanted to try and get publicity about this because I’m gonna guess that a lot of your listeners have heard that thump of a bird hitting a window, and what they don’t really think about is, that yes this is happening at your house, but it’s also happening at your neighbor’s and the folks across the street. Across the United States the estimate is that somewhere between a half a billion to a billion birds die each year from windows.”

Funding for the window mural came from an Iowa Department of Natural Resources grant and the Green Fund from the Central Student Senate. Cassie Severson, class of 2023, and Jocy Timmerman, class of 2024, co-authored the grant along with Benedict. The art majors who designed the window coverings were Amelia Brown, Fynn Wadsworth and Madilynn Peitzman, all in the class of 2025. Central students who volunteered to help install the window stickers were Summer Chambers, Jillian Fairbanks, Jordan Helmick, and Carley Underwood, all from the class of 2027, and Madi Whalen from the class of 2026.

Hear more about the mural from Benedict, Kelly, and Timmerman on an upcoming Let’s Talk Pella.