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Vandalising a bus shelter with graffiti is generally frowned upon, but it turns out that a spray of funky lettering can help save the lives of birds.

Shelters made with large panels of clear glass or plastic present birds with an invisible, potentially life-threatening obstacle. Now, researchers in Poland have found that the rate of collisions with these structures falls dramatically when they are plastered with opaque graffiti.

Researchers at the Polish Academy of Sciences made regular visits to 81 different bus shelters in the south-west of Poland over a year. They looked for signs of impact left on the shelters鈥� panels, including , a substance that protects a bird鈥檚 feathers.

The researchers found a total of 36 bird carcasses on the ground at bus shelters. These were always associated with imprint traces, which indicated how slamming into the bus shelters at speed can be fatal.

However, they found that bus shelters covered in graffiti or dust were associated with far fewer signs of impact and no carcasses. A clean glass shelter was around seven times more likely to have evidence of collisions than a graffiti-covered shelter.

The researchers point out that there are hundreds of thousands of bus shelters in Poland alone. They estimate that up to 1 million bird collisions may be occurring at these structures every year.

The fatal consequences of bus shelters for flying fowl have probably been overlooked, says Erin Bayne at the University of Alberta in Canada.

鈥淭here鈥檚 a lot of bus shelters we鈥檝e probably never counted, putting that into the estimate just is going to push that number much higher,鈥� he says.

The authors of the study point out that vandalising bus shelters with graffiti is illegal in Poland. They suggest official interventions such as partially covering clear hoardings with artwork or maps to reduce avian collisions.

Jack Dumbacher at the California Academy of Sciences agrees with this approach. The academy鈥檚 museum has already begun installing partially transparent and artistic windows in the hope of preventing bird strikes.