Nearly 1,000 songbirds making their annual journey in search of warmer weather died in a single night after crashing into the same building on Chicago’s waterfront.
The horrific carnage was laid bare Thursday morning, with dead and injured birds littering the street surrounding the McCormick Place Lakeside Center.
“It was like a carpet of dead birds on the windows,” David Willard, retired collections manager for the bird division at the Field Museum in Chicago, told the Associated Press.
Willard checks the grounds of Chicago’s lakefront expo center during migration season for dead birds.
“A normal night there would be between zero and 15 (dead) birds. “It was just a shocking outlier of what we’ve experienced… In 40 years of tracking what’s happening at McCormick, we’ve never seen anything remotely on that scale.”
Bird experts collected 964 dead birds of 33 species, mostly warblers, along with about 80 stunned live birds, according to the National Audubon Society, a bird advocacy organization.
The tragic event appears to be a combination of high-intensity migration, adverse flying weather conditions and the bright lights emitted from the 583,000-square-foot glass McCormick Place.
The horrific carnage was laid bare Thursday morning, with dead and injured birds littering the street surrounding the McCormick Place Lakeside Center. AP bird experts collected 964 dead birds of 33 species, mostly warblers, along with an estimated 80 stunned live birds, according to the National Audubon Society, a bird advocacy organization. AP
The pre-dawn rain likely forced the hordes of migrating birds to descend to lower altitudes, where they were enchanted by the illuminated lights along the boardwalk they followed.
Artificial lights attract and confuse night-migrating birds, such as sparrows and warblers, which use the stars to orient themselves.
If they do not fly directly towards the building, they tend to fly around the lights until they die of exhaustion, a phenomenon known as fatal light attraction.
The pre-dawn rain likely forced the hordes of migrating birds to descend to lower altitudes, where they were enchanted by the illuminated lights along the boardwalk they followed.Googoe Maps
McCormick Place is a notorious strike zone, according to experts, and Chicago was listed by Cornell University in 2019 as one of the most dangerous cities for migratory birds.
Before this week, the worst crash numbers I had seen at McCormick Place were around 200.
“You pick up a rose-breasted grosbeak and realize that if it hadn’t been for a building in Chicago, it would be wintering in the foothills of the Andes,” Willard told Audubon.
“It’s a shame a city can’t be less of an obstacle.”
Up to 988 million birds are killed each year by window strikes across the United States, according to a 2014 study by the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and the Federal Fish and Wildlife Service.AP
According to a 2014 study by the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and the Federal Fish and Wildlife Service, up to 988 million birds are killed by window strikes each year across the United States.
Humans can easily lessen the annual tragedies by adding screens, painting your windows or applying decals to the glass, or simply turning off the lights at night.
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Source: vtt.edu.vn