“A glass-clad conference center in Chicago once killed up to 1,000 birds a day during the peak of migration season. After adding a simple, unobtrusive pattern to the window panes, bird deaths fell 95 percent,” reports The Doomslayer.
The New York Times reports:
At the building that has long been the city’s most notorious bird killer, a sprawling lakefront conference venue that claimed almost a thousand birds on a single day in October 2023, new protections were in place.
The vast glass windows and doors of the building, called Lakeside Center at McCormick Place, are overlaid with a pattern of close, opaque dots. Applied last summer to help birds perceive the glass, the treatment’s early results are nothing short of remarkable. During fall migration, deaths were down by about 95 percent when compared with the two previous autumns….
Researchers have estimated that hundreds of millions of birds die hitting buildings every year in the United States…Chicago is one of the most dangerous cities in the country for migrating birds, according to research by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. And no building was known to be more lethal than McCormick Place’s Lakeside Center….
The [dots] treatment cost $1.2 million, paid for by the state of Illinois….it was installed in a hectic three-month period last summer to be in place for fall migration. Visitors don’t seem to even notice the dots from the inside.
A billion birds in America die each year in collisions with windows, according to the American Bird Conservancy
An architect has been adding bird feeders around her own home to reduce bird collisions with her windows. “I’ve found that birds slow down and stop at feeders instead of trying to fly through the glass,” she said. While office buildings and skyscrapers get the most attention, homes and low-rise buildings are the site of a majority of bird deaths. “The huge challenge is that glass is everywhere,” says Christine Sheppard, head of the glass collisions program at American Bird Conservancy (ABC). “It’s hard to know what I know and not cringe when I look at it.”
A wasp is saving one of the world’s rarest birds from extinction.
Birds-of-paradise can emit light via their feathers.
