We Can Fix Buildings That Kill Birds

Nearly a thousand birds were killed in a single night in Chicago this month, as they flew into the side of a single building, the McCormick Place Lakeside Center. It was both horrifying and frustrating, because the tragedy could have been prevented with some fairly simple precautions.

“To have so many birds at one building is just devastating,” Annette Prince, director of Chicago Bird Collision Monitors, told the Chicago Sun-Times. “We’re in the middle of fall migration, which reaches its height from September to October. The amount of artificial lighting and glass in the city, combined with millions of birds coming each year, it’s dangerous for them.”

The killer building, a low-lying mostly glass structure on Lake Michigan, is owned by the Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority, which says they have a voluntary lights-off policy during the migration season. But the lights stay on during events, as they were on the night of October 4, to the detriment of hundreds of migratory songbirds.

The travesty spurred the Center for Biological Diversity to call on the US Fish and Wildlife Service to enforce the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which had been effectively neutered by the Trump Administration when it declared the law did not prohibit the unintentional killing of migratory birds. Biden’s FWS revoked that ruling in 2021, but has not gone after offenders.

“I hope the Fish and Wildlife Service fines the authority, uses the money to mitigate these tragic deaths, and requires a strict lights-out policy during migration season,” CBD senior advocate Tara Zuardo wrote in an open letter to the agency. “When saving the lives of 1,000 birds is as simple as flipping off a light switch, it’s unconscionable to require anything less.”

McCormick Place says it is “currently in the midst of reimaging and renovating” the killer building and is “consulting with experts to identify the best options for both immediate and long-term solutions.” Here’s a tip: mandatory – not voluntary – lights-out policy between September and October.

An estimated one billion birds in building collisions each year in North America, the overwhelming majority of deaths during the spring and fall migration.

Pat Nabong / Chicago Sun-Times

Photo credit:  Associated Press