Around 1,000 songbirds died recently during night-time after they suffered a crash into US' McCormick Place Lakeside Center's windows amid a deadly conflux of prime migration conditions, rain and the low-slung exhibition hall's lights and window-lined walls. David Willard, the person who had been checking the grounds of Chicago’s lakefront exhibition center for dead birds for nearly 40 years told the news agency Associated Press, “It was just like a carpet of dead birds at the windows there.”
Willard is a retired bird division collections manager at the Chicago Field Museum. His duties included administering, preserving and cataloguing the museum’s collection of 500,000 bird specimens along with searching for bird strikes as part of migration research. While talking about this event, Williard said that he had never seen anything remotely close to such a scale in his past 40 years of working. He added that a normal night would be when zero to 15 birds would die in such a manner but this was a shocking outlier for even him, reported AP News.
A senior conservation ecologist at the Field Museum of Natural History, Douglas Stotz, told CBS News "It was an unbelievable kill that happened, and there were over 900. I think the final total was 961 birds just at McCormick Place."
Stotz added, "When birds are migrating, they don't understand that they can't fly through windows, and lights attract them. So the combination of lights and windows is deadly."
As per the estimate of researchers, hundreds of millions of birds die each year in the US in window strikes. A study was released by Scientists with the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 2014 according to which around 365 million to 988 million birds die annually, AP reported.
The AP reported that window strike is an issue in almost every major US city. The reason behind it being such a common issue is that birds are not able to see clear or reflective glass and they don't understand it’s a lethal barrier. When they see plants or bushes through the windows or see them being reflected in them then they head straight for them and in the process, they end up killing themselves.
Birds that migrate during the night rely on the stars to navigate. The bright lighting on the buildings attracts the birds and confuses them which increases the crashes or leaves birds flying around until they die from exhaustion. This phenomenon is known as fatal light attraction, reported AP.
According to a report of the Al-Arabiya, an avian ecologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, named Anna Pidgeon said that window strikes and fatal light attraction are easily preventable. Pidgeon added that building managers can simply dim their lights, and architects can design windows with markings on the glass that the birds would recognise easily. She further said that people can add screens, paint their windows or apply decals to the glass as well.