From the Winter 2025 concern of Dwelling Hen journal. Subscribe now.
On a heat morning in October 2024, Dave Willard, the retired hen collections curator for Chicago’s Subject Museum of Pure Historical past, walked briskly alongside a glassy façade on the Lake Michigan shoreline, on the lookout for fallen birds. The constructing product of glass is McCormick Place, the conference heart notorious to birders for being the place the place close to 1,000 migrating songbirds met their deaths on Oct. 5, 2023.
Willard has taken walks like this one practically 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 sometimes collects practically 1,000 lifeless birds at McCormick Place over the course of a yr. 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. toes of glassy floor. The markers have been utilized as a part of a $1.2 million undertaking final summer season performed by the Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority, which owns and operates McCormick Place, to keep away from one other avian disaster.
“Each migration is completely different,” Willard says, “however the prognosis is sweet.”
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 effectively over 100 lifeless birds have been collected on the base of skyscrapers throughout town by the nonprofit group Chicago Hen Collision Displays, Willard discovered just one or two lifeless 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 acquired 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 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 other migratory species that journey by means of 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 shoppers have 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 resolution.
“MPEA has at all times strived to be a great neighbor and environmental steward, each inside and outdoors our campus,” stated MPEA CEO Larita Clark in a press launch. “After we discovered of the reported mass collision occasion final yr, we knew that we would have liked to rapidly make further enhancements to guard native and migratory birds as they go McCormick Place.”
The MPEA labored with Feather Friendly, a Toronto-based firm that makes scientifically examined bird-deterrent merchandise for glass, on the undertaking. Installers labored from June to August, rigorously 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 homeowners in Chicago are coming to the corporate to ask concerning the product that MPEA placed on McCormick Place.
“After we first began, it was exhausting 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 effectively. “Consciousness is at an all-time excessive.” Extra about how to make your home’s windows safer for birds.
That recognition comes not a second too quickly, says Chicago Hen Collision Displays director Annette Prince. She notes that town’s municipal codes presently don’t require constructing homeowners and designers to make buildings hen pleasant, and {that a} new growth deliberate alongside the Chicago River—a brand new Bally’s On line casino—consists of 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, and so they haven’t collapsed right into a pile of mud as a result of they’re being hen pleasant,” she says. “I feel that we will have enticing structure and hen security. They don’t must be mutually unique.”
