David Willard has been checking the grounds of Chicago's lakefront exhibition center for dead birds for 40 years. On Thursday morning he found something horrible: Hundreds of dead songbirds, so thick they looked like a carpet.
Nearly 1,000 songbirds perished during the night after crashing into the McCormick Place Lakeside Center 's windows, the result, according to avian experts, of a deadly confluence of prime migration conditions, rain and the low-slung exhibition hall's lights and window-lined walls.
Window strikes are an issue in almost every major U.S. city. Birds don't see clear or reflective glass and don't understand it's a lethal barrier. When they see plants or bushes through windows or reflected in them, they head for them, killing themselves in the process. Small songbirds feed during the day and migrate at night to avoid air turbulence and predators. They've been waiting for northerly winds to give them a boost south, Temple said, but September saw unusually warm southern winds that kept birds in a holding pattern here. On Wednesday evening a front swept south, providing a tailwind, and thousands of birds took to the skies.
Window strikes and fatal light attraction are easily preventable, said Anna Pidgeon, an avian ecologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Building managers can simply dim their lights, she said, and architects can design windows with markings in the glass that birds can easily recognize. People can add screens, paint their windows or apply decals to the glass as well.
"It's an odd building," Willard said of the exhibition center. "When it was built, people weren't thinking about bird safety. They still aren't in most architecture. It's right on the lakefront. There are many nights when it's lit up. People are describing the whole night of migration as part of a once in a lifetime thing ... this still is an unacceptable intrusion by humans and their architecture. Just terribly sad and dramatic.
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