Current:Home > MyAvian enthusiasts try to counter the deadly risk of Chicago high-rises for migrating birds -MoneyBase
Avian enthusiasts try to counter the deadly risk of Chicago high-rises for migrating birds
View
Date:2025-04-15 08:16:14
CHICAGO (AP) — With a neon-green net in hand, Annette Prince briskly walks a downtown Chicago plaza at dawn, looking left and right as she goes.
It’s not long before she spots a tiny yellow bird sitting on the concrete. It doesn’t fly away, and she quickly nets the bird, gently places it inside a paper bag and labels the bag with the date, time and place.
“This is a Nashville warbler,” said Prince, director of the Chicago Bird Collision Monitors, noting that the bird must have flown into a glass window pane of an adjacent building. “He must only weigh about two pennies. He’s squinting his eyes because his head hurts.”
For rescue groups like the Chicago Bird Collision Monitors, this scene plays out hundreds of times each spring and fall after migrating birds fly into homes, small buildings and sometimes Chicago’s skyscrapers and other hulking buildings.
A stark sign of the risks came last fall, when 1,000 migrating birds died on a single night after flying into the glass exterior of the city’s lakefront convention center, McCormick Place. This fall, the facility unveiled new bird-safe window film on one of its glass buildings along the Lake Michigan shore.
The $1.2 million project installed tiny dots on the exterior of the Lakeside Center building, adorning enough glass to cover two football fields.
Doug Stotz, senior conservation ecologist at the nearby Field Museum, hopes the project will be a success. He estimated that just 20 birds have died after flying into the convention’s center’s glass exterior so far this fall, a hopeful sign.
“We don’t have a lot of data since this just started this fall, but at this point, it looks like it’s made a huge difference,” Stotz said.
But for the birds that collide with Chicago buildings, there is a network of people waiting to help. They also are aiming to educate officials and find solutions to improve building design, lighting and other factors in the massive number of bird collision deaths in Chicago and worldwide.
Prince said she and other volunteers walk the streets downtown to document what they can of the birds that are killed and injured.
“We have the combination of the millions of birds that pass through this area because it’s a major migratory path through the United States, on top of the amount of artificial lighting that we put out at night, which is when these birds are traveling and getting confused and attracted to the amount of glass,” Prince said.
Dead birds are often saved for scientific use, including by Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History. Rescued birds are taken to local wildlife rehabilitation centers to recover, such as the DuPage Wildlife Conservation Center in suburban Illinois.
On a recent morning, veterinarian Darcy Stephenson at DuPage gave a yellow-bellied sapsucker anesthetic gas before taping its wings open for an X-ray. The bird arrived with a note from a rescue group: “Window collision.”
Examining the results, she found the bird had a broken ulna — a bone in the wing.
The center takes in about 10,000 species of animals annually and 65% of them are avian. Many are victims of window collisions and during peak migration in the fall, several hundred birds can show up in one day.
“The large chunk of these birds do actually survive and make it back into the wild once we’re able to treat them,” said Sarah Reich, head veterinarian at DuPage. “Fractures heal very, very quickly in these guys for shoulder fractures. Soft tissue trauma generally heals pretty well. The challenging cases are going to be the ones where the trauma isn’t as apparent.”
Injured birds go through a process of flight testing, then get a full physical exam by the veterinary staff and are rehabilitated before being set free.
“It’s exciting to be able to get these guys back out into the wild, especially some of those cases that we’re kind of cautiously optimistic about or maybe have an injury that we’ve never treated successfully before,” Reich said, adding that these are the cases “clinic staff get really, really excited about.”
veryGood! (5846)
Related
- Toyota to invest $922 million to build a new paint facility at its Kentucky complex
- Students, faculty and staff of Vermont State University urge board to reconsider cuts
- White House hoping Biden-Xi meeting brings progress on military communications, fentanyl fight
- You're First in Line to Revisit King Charles III's Road to the Throne
- New Mexico governor seeks funding to recycle fracking water, expand preschool, treat mental health
- Schools in a Massachusetts town remain closed for a fourth day as teachers strike
- Stock market today: Asian shares are mostly higher ahead of US inflation data and a US-China summit
- Cantaloupes sold in at least 10 states recalled over possible salmonella contamination
- Rolling Loud 2024: Lineup, how to stream the world's largest hip hop music festival
- Horoscopes Today, November 14, 2023
Ranking
- Dick Vitale announces he is cancer free: 'Santa Claus came early'
- Inmates burn bedsheets during South Carolina jail riot
- Gospel singer Bobbi Storm faces backlash for singing on a flight after Grammy nomination
- Man, 40, is fatally shot during exchange of gunfire with police in southwestern Michigan
- Paula Abdul settles lawsuit with former 'So You Think You Can Dance' co
- NCAA Division I men's soccer tournament: Bracket, schedule, seeds for 2023 championship
- Underdogs: Orioles' Brandon Hyde, Marlins' Skip Schumaker win MLB Manager of the Year awards
- CBS shows are back after actors' strike ends. Here are the 2024 premiere dates
Recommendation
Juan Soto to be introduced by Mets at Citi Field after striking record $765 million, 15
Aging satellites and lost astronaut tools: How space junk has become an orbital threat
State senator to challenge Womack in GOP primary for US House seat in northwest Arkansas
State senator to challenge Womack in GOP primary for US House seat in northwest Arkansas
Global Warming Set the Stage for Los Angeles Fires
The last government shutdown deadline ousted the House speaker. This week’s showdown could be easier
The UN's Guterres calls for an 'ambition supernova' as climate progress stays slow
Gospel singer Bobbi Storm faces backlash for singing on a flight after Grammy nomination