This Durham home is Maine’s first bird-safe home

By Sara Anne Donnelly
Photos by Rachel Sieben
From our September 2024 issue

The moment Jeannette and Derek Lovitch laid eyes on their 78 acres of woodland and wetlands in Durham, they knew they had found their bird sanctuary. “It’s lowland with lots of cherry trees, a habitat that’s really good for birds,” Derek says. “We wanted to live where there were already birds.” The Lovitches are biologists and the owners of Freeport Wild Bird Supply, where picture windows frame a small garden of native plants and feeders that attract dozens of birds daily. Preferring a home with an even wilder view, in 2022 they hired Matt Maiello and Austin Smith (a birder Derek met at the store) of Portland-based Scott Simons Architects to turn their vision into reality. Now, the couple’s 2,000-square-foot modern property features a large, high-ceilinged room with 14-foot-tall window columns that create two panoramic viewing nooks. They overlook a garden filled with native plants that attract hummingbirds, such as jewelweed and obedient plants, as well as a dozen feeders, nine birdhouses, two bat houses, a birdbath and a pond the couple dug to attract waterfowl. “But the more birds you attract to your garden, the more likely they are to come into contact with glass,” Derek says. “We wanted to watch the birds and not worry about them flying into the windows.”

In the United States, up to a billion birds die each year from crashing into windows, mistaking reflections for sky or trees. One easy way to protect them is to keep screens up year-round or to add patterned adhesive film to the windows that acts as a barrier for birds. Neither option appealed to the Lovitches. “We didn’t want anyone to be able to take the film off in case we had to sell the house,” Derek says. So the couple got glass for most of the windows with acid-etched stripes that break up reflections. To allow an unobstructed view into the great room, they installed more expensive lower windows with ultraviolet-reflective patterns that are meant to be visible to birds but transparent to the human eye. One morning, however, the couple watched in horror as a black-eyed junco flew right into the glass and died. In the months that followed, 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 affected windows with adhesive film with white dots scattered across it, and there have been no further incidents. This spring, Bird-Safe Maine declared the house “Maine’s first bird-safe residential building” and honored the Lovitches with its Residential Excellence Award.

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

A summer day inside the house actually feels like a visit to a bird sanctuary. The couple has recorded sightings of more than 150 species, which fill the forest with chirping songs and fly in carefree arcs around the house, coming so close to the windows that their wingtips seem to touch the glass. Inside, the couple watches the spectacle from two armchairs in their observation nook, binoculars between them. That’s how they met two decades ago, as two young biologists on a field study observing bird behavior. They like their view here even more. “We don’t have to get in our car and burn gas every day to go bird watching,” says Derek. “We’re over the moon.”

Get our latest stories delivered straight to your inbox every month. Subscribe Down in the East Magazine.