The answer is yes!

We had an insane Cardinal hit my living room bay window over and over again this spring, as often as 30 times an hour for days and days. We tried putting pictures of hawks in the window, tried rushing the window, moving things away from the sill, moving things onto the sill - nothing worked.

We were unable to attach anything to the outside of the window because there is shrubbery in front and my garden in front of that - you just can't get close enough.

Finally, it began raining and that seemed to end his siege. The windows are now permanently scratched from his claws. It was awful, I felt terrible for the poor thing.

We have 3 sliding glass doors in the building where I work. Birds were flying into them in the afternoons when the woods behind the house were reflected in the glass.

A few years ago, I put a life-sized picture of an owl on the inside of each window. Before taping them down, I went outside and looked to be sure they were located right. I really didn't expect it to work, but since then there's only been one bird/glass collision that I'm aware of.

My mother had a demented cardinal that would repeatedly hurl himself against the kitchen window. She put a plastic snake on the window sill, and it stopped. But, then the same bird started hanging out on my mother's car, looking at himself in the car mirrors and crapping down the side of her car. He would do this all day long. This bird drove my mother crazy. She had to keep plastic bags over her car mirrors for several years so that she wouldn't have to clean bird crap off the car door every time she got in it. She even thought about hiring someone to shoot the bird.

My "new age" aunt told my mother that she thought that the bird was my deceased father reincarnated as a bird who was trying to communicate with her. Frankly, I think my dad would know better than to crap down the side of my mother's car. LOL!

My sunroom is three sides floor to ceiling glass and there are occasional bird collisions, but not so many that I've felt the need to take measures. And so far, after a little recovery time, they've all righted themselves and flown away. Supposedly those semi-transparent decals do work, but I'm not sure how they'd stand up to repeated window washing.

Adding to the demented bird stories, last spring I had a robin who adopted a window a day and went around the whole downstairs, window by window, pecking furiously for no apparent reason for nearly a week. Very strange ....

Spazzycat, your aunt's explanation is hysterical, as is your observation!