Professor Noah Perlut honored with BirdSafe Maine award for educational excellence

Noah Perlut, Ph.D., professor and assistant academic director of the School of Marine and Environmental Programs at the University of New England, has been awarded an inaugural BirdSafe Maine Award for Educational Excellence in honor of his work to protect migrating birds from window strikes on the University’s Biddeford Campus.

BirdSafe Maine is a partnership between Maine Audubon, the University of Southern Maine, and the Portland Society for Architecture that honors companies, schools, and individuals working to protect birds from window strikes.

According to the Maine Audubon, as many as 988 million birds die each year in the United States after accidentally colliding with glass windows. The BirdSafe Maine awards recognize companies, educators, designers and architects, and other individuals who have taken bird-safe action.

Perlut was bestowed the honor for successfully encouraging UNE to install bird-safe glass in the Danielle N. Ripich Commons in 2018. The special glass uses technology to break up its reflectivity, thereby alerting birds to its presence and reducing the potential for window strikes.

“I am thrilled about this project," Perlut remarked, crediting his Avian Ecology students, who gathered over 1,000 signatures from UNE community members to support the installation of bird-safe glass. “Importantly, these students monitor the success of this project every fall, searching for birds that have died from window strikes across the Biddeford Campus buildings. Their work has identified that the bird glass on the Ripich Commons really works.”

Perlut is an ornithologist with expertise in ecology, conservation biology, animal behavior, migration and dispersal, and breeding systems. His research explores the ecological and evolutionary consequences of human habitat management on bird and animal populations across diverse habitats — from grassland songbirds to gulls on Portland’s rooftops, nighthawks nesting in the Caribbean, and others in between.

For nearly two decades, Perlut has studied how agricultural management affects bobolinks and Savannah sparrows in Vermont hayfields. Additionally, in Biddeford, hundreds of Perlut’s students have participated in studies at the Squirrelology Lab, tracking radio-collared gray squirrels across UNE’s waterfront campus.  

For his research dedication and work as a teacher-scholar, Perlut was named the 2020-2021 Ludcke Chair of Liberal Arts and Sciences.