From Risk to Resilience: Saving Birds at the Sandra Stetson Aquatic Center

Stetson University’s Sandra Stetson Aquatic Center, home to the Institute for Water and Environmental Resilience (IWER) and Stetson’s rowing teams, is a two-story, 11,000 square foot facility located just outside of DeLand. The building, known simply as the Aquatic Center, features expansive views of Lake Beresford, and is surrounded by natural vegetation, including educational hiking trails. The property grounds have been used as a Christmas Bird Count site for quite some time, and they feature innovative green infrastructure demonstrations for addressing water quality impairment, such as native plant stormwater buffers, a rain garden, and floating wetland mats. The center itself has a large conference room, named the Lakeview Room, where community workshops, trainings, and events are frequently held.

Unfortunately, the building’s unique architectural design, which allows for picturesque views of the lake and surrounding green space, also includes a large area of highly reflective glass windows. To address continuous bird collisions, a “Audubon in Action” grant was awarded by the National Audubon Society in the fall of 2024, which enabled patterned dot-grid Feather-Friendly window markers to be installed on the north-facing side of the upstairs of the building in spring 2025. However, bird strikes and disorientation continued on the south and west-facing sides of the building, and in at least two cases, collisions occurred during birding events held at the site in 2025. A second grant was awarded to the West Volusia Audubon Society in 2026, in partnership with IWER, to complete the installation of patterned window markers on the south and west-facing windows of the Aquatic Center, thus reducing strikes by increasing visibility for migratory and resident birds.