CHICAGO — Annette Prince walks briskly, looking left and right through the downtown Chicago square at dawn, holding a neon green net in her hand.
Soon she found a little yellow bird sitting on the concrete. If the bird doesn’t fly away, quickly net it, place it carefully in a paper bag, and label the bag with the date, time, and location.
“This is Nashville’s songbird,” said Prince, director of Chicago Bird Collision Monitors, noting that the bird must have flown into a window of an adjacent building. “He probably only weighs about two pennies. Here’s why he’s squinting: It gives me a headache.”
For rescue groups like Chicago Bird Collision Monitors, this scene is played hundreds of times each spring and fall after migratory birds fly into homes, small buildings, and sometimes Chicago’s skyscrapers and other massive buildings.
This danger was evident last fall when 1,000 migratory birds died in one night after flying through the glass exterior of McCormick Place, the city’s lakefront convention center. This fall, the facility unveiled a new bird-proof window film on one of its glass buildings along the Lake Michigan shore.
The $1.2 million project placed a dot on the exterior of the Lakeside Center building, draping 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 only 20 birds that flew outside the convention center’s glass have died so far this fall, a hopeful sign.
“We don’t have a lot of data since we started this fall, but at this point it looks like we’ve seen a big change,” Stotz said.
But there is a network of people waiting for help for birds that collide with Chicago buildings. They also aim to educate public officials and find solutions to improve building design, lighting and other factors responsible for the staggering number of bird strike deaths in Chicago and around the world.
Prince said she and other volunteers walked the city streets recording what they could about dead and injured birds.
“We have a combination of millions of birds passing through this area. This is because the region is a major migratory corridor for birds through the United States. Added to this is the amount of artificial light we turn on at night when these birds are traveling and migrating. I was confused and fascinated by the amount of glass,” Prince said.
Dead birds are often kept for scientific purposes, such as at the Natural History Museum in Chicago. Rescued birds are transported to local wildlife rehabilitation centers, such as the DuPage Wildlife Conservation Center in suburban Illinois, to recover.
On a recent morning, DuPage veterinarian Darcy Stephenson administered anesthetic gas to a yellow-bellied sapper and then taped up its wings for an X-ray. The bird arrived with a note from the rescue team. “Window crash”.
Upon examining the results, she discovered that the bird’s ulna (bone in the wing) was broken.
The center receives approximately 10,000 animal species each year, 65% of which are birds. Many are victims of window collisions, and during peak autumn migration periods there can be hundreds of birds a day.
“A big chunk of these birds actually survive and are released back into the wild once we can treat them,” said Sarah Reich, DuPage’s chief veterinarian. “These people’s shoulder fractures heal very, very quickly. Soft tissue trauma generally heals fairly well. The difficult cases will be those where the trauma is not evident.”
Injured birds undergo a flight test process, then undergo a full physical examination by a veterinarian and undergo a rehabilitation process before being released.
“It’s very exciting to be able to release these people back into the wild, especially if they have injuries that we’re cautiously optimistic about or that we haven’t treated successfully before,” Reich added. It’s a case where “the clinic staff gets really, really excited.”
