In just one night, more than a thousand migrating birds died after crashing into a single building in Chicago, due to what experts say was a deadly combination of migration season, difficult weather, and a lack of “bird-friendly” building measures.
Philadelphia has dimmed its skyline after a ‘mass collision’ killed thousands of migrating birds
The Chicago Field Museum collected more than a thousand dead birds that had collided with the McCormick Place Lakeside Center, a convention center located on the shore of Lake Michigan, Wednesday night into Thursday morning, Annette Prince, director of Chicago Bird Collision Monitors, told CNN.
Volunteers working with Chicago Bird Collision Monitors collected an additional thousand dead birds from the city’s downtown area, said Prince. And there were likely more birds that flew away after colliding into a building but later died of their injuries, she said.
“It was overwhelming and tragic to see this many birds,” Prince said. “I went to a building where, when I walked up to the building, it was like there was just a carpet of dead and dying and injured birds.”
A combination of factors likely contributed to the extraordinary number of deadly collisions, Prince said.
There was a particularly high volume of birds set to migrate south for the winter that night. The birds had been waiting for winds from the north or west to ease their journey. “Those birds essentially piled up,” Prince said. When the right winds arrived on Wednesday, a large number of birds set off for their migration at once. Additionally, “there were foggy and low cloud conditions, which can bring them into confusion with lights and buildings,” Prince said. The clouds likely caused the birds to fly at a lower altitude, bringing them closer into contact with buildings. McCormick Place in particular “is one of the first buildings birds encounter as they move along Lake Michigan,” she said.
I don’t know when it became fashionable to shit on density. Every single time I look at a video about urban planning I hear some moron with a euro accent tell me how bad skyscrapers are because ummm reasons.
I don’t know. I normally see the opposite. I normally see things about being more dense with good public transport and consideration into how we move around that space. I guess we have different algorithms.
It’s also usually Americans arguing for less density from what I’ve seen. European cities tend to be far more dense than ours because of their limited space. They may often have more parks and things though.
Well I am an American and I argue for density. It is not a cure all and there are tradeoffs but on the whole it is the way things should be going.
I get to make infrastructure for the US and Europe. Generally speaking I can depend on better electricity in Europe since, due to density, they just don’t have as many super rural areas. Of course the tradeoff is more paperwork, engineering time, and more ancient cities. You are never going to get win win.
It become fashionable when people realized density doesn’t work with an overreliance on cars and a lack of public transportation.
Which is how every major American city is designed.
Shout out to Santa Fe though for putting a limit on how tall buildings can be. One of my favorite cities.