“Anywhere you’ve got glass, you’re going to have birds hitting the windows,” said Bryan Lenz at the American Bird Conservancy. Weather conditions like opposing wind, rain and fog can make it difficult for birds to orientate themselves, in addition to light pollution from cities that can draw them in and trap them among deadly structures. “In fact, we often see birds collide with glass and they continue flying some distance away, seriously injured in ways that ultimately they won’t survive past a few hours,” Samuels added.īirds dying in large numbers in a small geographic area tends to occur during peak migration periods in spring and fall. He noted that the true extent of affected birds will unravel over a couple of days as people continue to pick up birds around downtown Chicago. “Not every bird that hits the window is going to leave behind a body,” said Brendon Samuels, who researches bird window collisions at the University of Western Ontario. Carcasses of Tennessee warblers, hermit thrush, American woodcocks and other varieties of songbirds were recovered. “It’s the tip of an iceberg but it’s it’s a huge, huge amount of birds we found both dead and injured,” said Annette Prince, director of Chicago Bird Collision Monitors, adding that this was the highest number of bird strikes that the group recorded from the grounds of one building in a single day.įrom late Wednesday, 4 October, through early Thursday, 5 October, a peak estimate of 1.5 million birds were in the air over Cook county, home to the Chicago metropolitan area.
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