With a neon-green net in hand, Annette Prince briskly walks a downtown Chicago plaza at dawn, looking left and right as she goes. It's not long before she spots a tiny yellow bird sitting on the concrete. It doesn't fly away, and she quickly nets the bird, gently places it inside a paper bag, and labels the bag with the date, time, and place. "This is a Nashville warbler," said Prince, director of the Chicago Bird Collision Monitors, noting that the bird must have flown into a glass window pane of an adjacent building. "He must only weigh about two pennies. He's squinting his eyes because his head hurts." For rescue groups like the CBCM, this scene plays out hundreds of times each spring and fall after migrating birds fly into homes, small buildings, and sometimes Chicago's skyscrapers.
A stark sign of the risks came last fall, when 1,000 migrating birds died on a single night after flying into the glass exterior of the city's lakefront convention center, McCormick Place. This fall, the facility unveiled new bird-safe window film on one of its glass buildings. The $1.2 million project installed tiny dots on the exterior of the Lakeside Center building, adorning enough glass to cover two football fields. Doug Stotz, a senior conservation ecologist at the nearby Field Museum, hopes the project will be a success. He estimated that just 20 birds have died after flying into the convention center's glass exterior so far this fall, a hopeful sign. "It looks like it's made a huge difference," Stotz said.
Prince said she and other volunteers walk the streets downtown to document what they can of birds that are killed and injured. Dead birds are often saved for scientific use, including by Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History. Rescued birds are taken to local wildlife rehabilitation centers to recover, such as the DuPage Wildlife Conservation Center. The center takes in about 10,000 species of animals annually, and 65% of them are avian. Many are victims of window collisions, and during peak migration in the fall, several hundred birds can show up in one day. "The large chunk of these birds do actually survive and make it back into the wild once we're able to treat them," said Sarah Reich, head veterinarian at DuPage. More here.
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