Experts say pre-dawn rain pushed them down into the city, where they became confused by the lights of the McCormick Place Lakeside Center.
Workers at the Chicago Field Museum inspect the bodies of migrating birds killed when they flew into the windows of the McCormick Place Lakeside Center, a Chicago exhibition hall, the night of Oct. 4-5, 2023.
“It was just like a carpet of dead birds at the windows there,” said Willard, a retired bird division collections manager at the Chicago Field Museum, where his duties included administering, preserving and cataloging the museum’s collection of 500,000 bird specimens as well as searching for bird strikes as part of migration research.
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. In 2017, for example, almost 400 passerines became disoriented in a Galveston, Texas, skyscraper’s floodlights and died in collisions with windows.
“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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