Every morning at dawn, a dozen volunteers scour the streets of Toronto picking up small birds. Some days they will find hundreds of them, most already dead or dying. A few they are able to save. Live birds are put in brown paper bags and driven to wildlife recovery centres, while dead birds are put in a large freezer. If no one picks them up, their carcasses are swept up by street cleaners.

“One of my first days was really horrific,” says Sohail Desai, a volunteer with the charity Fatal Light Awareness Program (Flap) Canada, which has about 135 people patrolling the streets across Toronto. Desai was walking close to his house in the North York area in Toronto when a flock of golden-crowned kinglets flew into a 15-storey glass building.

Desai ended up taking 80 birds to the wildlife centre that day – they could not all fit in his car so he did multiple runs. Another 80 were dead, bound for the freezer. “Some of them died in my hands,” he says.