CHICAGO– With a neon green net in hand, Annette Prince walks quickly across a downtown Chicago square at dawn, looking left and right.
It doesn’t take long before she sees a little yellow bird sitting on the concrete. It doesn’t fly away, and she quickly nets the bird, carefully places it in 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 of an adjacent building. “It only weighs about two cents. He squints his eyes because his head hurts.”
For rescue groups like the Chicago Bird Collision Monitors, this scene plays out hundreds of times every spring and fall after migratory birds fly into homes, small buildings and sometimes skyscrapers and other colossal buildings of Chicago.
A clear sign of the risks came last fall, when In one night, 1,000 migratory birds died 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 the glass buildings along the Lake Michigan shore.
The $1.2 million project added small dots to the exterior of the Lakeside Center building, adorning enough glass to cover two football fields.
Doug Stotz, a senior ecologist at the nearby Field Museum, hopes the project will be a success. He estimated that so far this fall, only 20 birds have died after flying into the glass exterior of the convention center, a hopeful sign.
“We don’t have a lot of data since this just started this fall, but right now it looks like it’s made a huge difference,” Stotz said.
But for the birds crashing into buildings in Chicago, there is a network of people waiting to help. They also want to train civil servants and find solutions improve building design, lighting and other factors in the enormous number of bird strike deaths in Chicago and worldwide.
Prince said she and other volunteers walk the streets of downtown to document what they can of the birds being killed and injured.
“We have the combination of the millions of birds that pass through this area because it is a major migration route across the United States, on top of the amount of artificial light we turn off at night, when these birds are traveling and moving. confused and attracted by the amount of glass,” Prince said.
Dead birds are often preserved 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, DuPage veterinarian Darcy Stephenson administered anesthetic gas to a yellow-bellied sapsucker before opening its wings for an X-ray. The bird arrived with a note from a rescue group: “Window collision.”
When she examined the results, she discovered that the bird had a broken ulna – a bone in the wing.
The center records approximately 10,000 animal species annually, 65% of which are birds. Many are victims of window strikes, and during peak migration in the fall, hundreds of birds can appear in one day.
“The vast majority of these birds actually survive and return to the wild as soon as we can treat them,” said Sarah Reich, chief veterinarian at DuPage. “Fractures heal very, very quickly in these guys for shoulder fractures. Soft tissue trauma generally heals quite well. The challenging cases will be the ones where the trauma is not so obvious.”
Injured birds undergo a process of flight testing, then undergo a full physical examination by veterinary staff and are rehabilitated before being released.
“It’s exciting to be able to get these guys back into the wild, especially in some of those cases where we’re somewhat cautiously optimistic about or where we might have an injury that we’ve never treated successfully before,” Reich said, adding adding that these are the cases that clinic staff get really excited about.
