Nearly 1,000 songbirds making their annual trek to warmer weather were killed in one night after crashing into the same building on Chicago’s waterfront.
The gruesome carnage came to light Thursday morning – with dead and injured birds littering the streets surrounding the McCormick Place Lakeside Center.
“It’s like a tapestry of dead birds in the window there,” David Willard, retired collection manager of the bird section at the Chicago Field Museum told the Associated Press.
Willard checks the grounds of Chicago’s lakefront fairgrounds during migration season for dead birds.
“A typical night is zero to 15 (dead) birds. It’s a startling departure from what we’ve experienced … In 40 years of tracking what’s going on at McCormick, we’ve never seen anything remotely on that scale.”
Ornithologists collected 964 dead birds across 33 species, mostly eagles, along with an estimated 80 startled live birds, according to the National Audubon Society, a bird activist organization.
The tragic event appears to have been a combination of high-intensity migration, adverse weather conditions for flights, and bright light shining from the 583,000-square-foot McCormick Place glass.
The gruesome carnage was revealed Thursday morning — with dead and injured birds littering the streets surrounding the McCormick Place Lakeside Center.AP Ornithologists collected 964 dead birds of 33 species, mostly eagles, along with an estimated 80 live birds that surprised, according to the National Audubon Society, a bird activist organization. AP
Pre-dawn rain likely forces flocks of migrating birds down to lower altitudes, where they are dazzled by the illuminated lights along the quay they follow.
Man-made lights attract and confuse nocturnal migratory birds — such as sparrows and eagles — that use the stars to navigate.
If they don’t fly directly into the building, they tend to fly around the lights until they die of exhaustion, a phenomenon known as the fatal light attraction.
Pre-dawn rain likely forces flocks of migrating birds down to lower altitudes, where they are dazzled by the illuminated lights along the quay they follow. Google Maps
McCormick Place is a notorious strike zone, according to experts, and Chicago was ranked by Cornell University in 2019 as one of the most dangerous cities for migratory birds.
Before this week, the worst number of collisions he had seen at McCormick Place was around 200.
“You take a Rose-breasted Grosbeak and realize, if it weren’t for the buildings in Chicago, it would spend its winter in the foothills of the Andes,” Willard told Audubon.
“It’s a shame that a city can’t be a barrier.”
As many as 988 million birds are killed each year in window strikes across the US, according to a 2014 study by the Smithsonian Institute for Conservation Biology and the federal Fish and Wildlife Service.AP
As many as 988 million birds are killed each year in window strikes across the US, according to a 2014 study by the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and the federal Fish and Wildlife Service.
Humans can easily reduce the annual tragedy by adding screens, painting their windows or putting stickers on the glass — or simply turning off their lights at night.
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Source: thtrangdai.edu.vn/en/
