From the Winter 2025 difficulty of Residing Fowl journal. Subscribe now.
On a heat morning in October 2024, Dave Willard, the retired hen collections curator for Chicago’s Discipline Museum of Pure Historical past, walked briskly alongside a glassy façade on the Lake Michigan shoreline, in search of fallen birds. The constructing fabricated from glass is McCormick Place, the conference heart notorious to birders for being the place the place near 1,000 migrating songbirds met their deaths on Oct. 5, 2023.
Willard has taken walks like this one almost each morning throughout the spring and fall migration seasons for the final 40 years, documenting the birds that crash into the constructing’s home windows. He usually collects almost 1,000 useless birds at McCormick Place over the course of a 12 months. This previous autumn, nonetheless, Willard says he discovered solely six.
The distinction seems to be the tiny white circles spaced each two inches alongside the whole lot of McCormick Place’s 120,000 sq. ft of glassy floor. The markers had been utilized as a part of a $1.2 million challenge final summer season carried out by the Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority, which owns and operates McCormick Place, to keep away from one other avian disaster.
“Each migration is totally different,” Willard says, “however the prognosis is sweet.”
The markers look like doing what they’re meant to do—preserve birds from slamming into the glass. On just a few heavy migration days in late August and early September, when properly over 100 useless birds had been collected on the base of skyscrapers throughout town by the nonprofit group Chicago Fowl Collision Screens, Willard discovered just one or two useless birds at McCormick Place. One of many volunteers in Willard’s survey effort even reported seeing a hen fly close to the constructing and veer away because it received nearer.
“If this actually works right here, and I’m ready till migration is over to say if it actually works, then let’s go on to the subsequent worst constructing, proper?” says Willard.
McCormick Place has lengthy had a fame as one of many worst bird-killing buildings in Chicago. The constructing’s location proper on the lakeshore, in the course of a migratory pathway, makes it notably lethal to migrating American Tree Sparrows, juncos, Yellow-rumped Warblers, and dozens of different migratory species that journey by town by night time.
For a number of years MPEA has participated in Chicago’s Lights Out program, a voluntary effort to scale back hen strikes by turning lights off throughout migration, however the conference heart solely went darkish when no employees, customer, or purchasers had been current. After final October’s catastrophe, McCormick Place officers drew the curtains contained in the conference heart to cowl up the inside lights throughout hen migration. The markers are a extra everlasting answer.
“MPEA has at all times strived to be a very good neighbor and environmental steward, each inside and outdoors our campus,” mentioned MPEA CEO Larita Clark in a press launch. “After we realized of the reported mass collision occasion final 12 months, we knew that we wanted to rapidly make extra enhancements to guard native and migratory birds as they move McCormick Place.”
The MPEA labored with Feather Pleasant, a Toronto-based firm that makes scientifically examined bird-deterrent merchandise for glass, on the challenge. Installers labored from June to August, fastidiously transferring the markers from the movie to the home windows throughout the whole lot of the outside glassy floor on McCormick Place. Feather Pleasant executives now say that different constructing house owners in Chicago are coming to the corporate to ask in regards to the product that MPEA placed on McCormick Place.
“After we first began, it was onerous to get anybody to even take into consideration doing one thing like this,” says Feather Pleasant vice chairman Paul Groleau, who notes that the corporate sells merchandise for residential buildings as properly. “Consciousness is at an all-time excessive.” Extra about find out how to make your house’s home windows safer for birds.
That recognition comes not a second too quickly, says Chicago Fowl Collision Screens director Annette Prince. She notes that town’s municipal codes presently don’t require constructing house owners and designers to make buildings hen pleasant, and {that a} new improvement deliberate alongside the Chicago River—a brand new Bally’s On line casino—contains plans for a large glass façade.
Prince says that any new buildings in Chicago ought to incorporate bird-friendly glass from the beginning.
“Different cities are doing it, they usually haven’t collapsed right into a pile of mud as a result of they’re being hen pleasant,” she says. “I believe that we will have engaging structure and hen security. They don’t need to be mutually unique.”