“It was just like a carpet of dead birds at the windows there.'
David Willard has been checking the grounds of Chicago’s lakefront exhibition center for dead birds for 40 years. On Thursday morning he found something horrible: Hundreds of dead songbirds, so thick they looked like a carpet.’s windows, the result, according to avian experts, of a deadly confluence of prime migration conditions, rain and the low-slung exhibition hall’s lights and window-lined walls.
In this image provided by the Chicago Field Museum, the bodies of migrating birds are displayed, Thursday, Oct. 5, 2023, at the Chicago Field Museum, in Chicago.Birds that migrate at night, like sparrows and warblers, rely on the stars to navigate. Bright lights from buildings both attract and confuse them, leading to window strikes or birds flying around the lights until they die from exhaustion — a phenomenon known as fatal light attraction.
“You had all these birds that were just raring to go but they’ve been held up with this weird September and October with temperatures way above normal,” Temple said. “You had this huge pack of birds take off.” Window strikes and fatal light attraction are easily preventable, said Anna Pidgeon, an avian ecologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Building managers can simply dim their lights, she said, and architects can design windows with markings in the glass that birds can easily recognize. People can add screens, paint their windows or apply decals to the glass as well.
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