Oct. 7 (UPI) — Close to 1,000 songbirds died this week after colliding with a single building in Chicago during the fall migration season, naturalists with the city’s Field Museum have confirmed.
The birds collided with McCormick Place Lakeside Center early Thursday morning, museum officials said.
Photos circulated across social media of the dead creatures spread across several tables after being collected from the streets.
“You pick up a Rose-breasted Grosbeak and realize, if it hadn’t been for a building in Chicago, it would be spending its winter in the foothills of the Andes,” Dave Willard, collection manager emeritus with the bird division of the Field Museum told the National Audubon Society in an interview.
“It’s just a shame that a city can’t be less of an obstacle.”
Nearly 1,000 birds died after striking the windows at McCormick Place convention center on October 5: the most Field collecting efforts have documented in the past 40 years.
: Lauren Nassef pic.twitter.com/d0AvYmwSQW— Field Museum (@FieldMuseum) October 6, 2023
Willard said the convention center, which borders Lake Michigan, is a “hot spot” for bird collisions during migration seasons.
He said Thursday’s mass collision was the worst he’d ever seen.
The Field Museum where Willard works collects and tracks Chicago’s bird collision deaths each year.
“To have so many birds at one building is just devastating. That is a very tragic amount of birds to find dead at all, especially from one building,” Chicago Bird Collision Monitors director Annette Prince told the Chicago Sun-Times.
“We’re in the middle of fall migration, which reaches its height from September to October. The amount of artificial lighting and glass in the city, combined with millions of birds coming each year, it’s dangerous for them,” she said.
