From the Winter 2025 difficulty of Residing Chicken journal. Subscribe now.
On a heat morning in October 2024, Dave Willard, the retired chicken collections curator for Chicago’s Area Museum of Pure Historical past, walked briskly alongside a glassy façade on the Lake Michigan shoreline, searching for 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 practically each morning through the spring and fall migration seasons for the final 40 years, documenting the birds that crash into the constructing’s home windows. He sometimes collects practically 1,000 useless birds at McCormick Place over the course of a 12 months. This previous autumn, nevertheless, Willard says he discovered solely six.
The distinction seems to be the tiny white circles spaced each two inches alongside the whole thing of McCormick Place’s 120,000 sq. ft of glassy floor. The markers had been utilized as a part of a $1.2 million venture final summer time 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 nice.”
The markers seem like doing what they’re meant to do—maintain birds from slamming into the glass. On a couple of heavy migration days in late August and early September, when nicely over 100 useless birds had been collected on the base of skyscrapers throughout the town by the nonprofit group Chicago Chicken Collision Displays, Willard discovered just one or two useless birds at McCormick Place. One of many volunteers in Willard’s survey effort even reported seeing a chicken fly close to the constructing and veer away because it bought 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 following worst constructing, proper?” says Willard.
McCormick Place has lengthy had a popularity 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 significantly lethal to migrating American Tree Sparrows, juncos, Yellow-rumped Warblers, and dozens of different migratory species that journey by means of the town by night time.
For a number of years MPEA has participated in Chicago’s Lights Out program, a voluntary effort to scale back chicken strikes by turning lights off throughout migration, however the conference heart solely went darkish when no employees, customer, or shoppers 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 chicken migration. The markers are a extra everlasting answer.
“MPEA has all the time strived to be a superb neighbor and environmental steward, each inside and out of doors our campus,” stated MPEA CEO Larita Clark in a press launch. “Once we discovered of the reported mass collision occasion final 12 months, we knew that we would have liked 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 venture. Installers labored from June to August, fastidiously transferring the markers from the movie to the home windows throughout the whole thing 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.
“Once 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 nicely. “Consciousness is at an all-time excessive.” Extra about make your private home’s home windows safer for birds.
That recognition comes not a second too quickly, says Chicago Chicken Collision Displays director Annette Prince. She notes that the town’s municipal codes at present don’t require constructing house owners and designers to make constructions chicken pleasant, and {that a} new improvement deliberate alongside the Chicago River—a brand new Bally’s On line casino—contains plans for an enormous glass façade.
Prince says that any new buildings in Chicago ought to incorporate bird-friendly glass from the beginning.
“Different cities are doing it, and so they haven’t collapsed right into a pile of mud as a result of they’re being chicken pleasant,” she says. “I feel that we are able to have enticing structure and chicken security. They don’t should be mutually unique.”
