Nearly a thousand birds die after crashing into windows at the Chicago Expo Center
“It was like a carpet of dead birds,” says one employee at the site, overwhelmed by the scale of the disaster.
Nearly 1,000 migratory songbirds died in the early hours of Thursday to Friday after colliding with the windows of an exhibition center in Chicago, United States.
According to bird experts, the incident is the result of initial migration conditions, rain, low lights at the exhibition center — McCormick Place Lakeside Center — and walls lined with windows, the Associated Press reported.
David Willard has been checking Chicago’s lakefront fairgrounds for 40 years looking for dead birds, but he was shocked Thursday morning by the sight he found: hundreds of dead songbirds.
“It was like a carpet of dead birds in the windows,” said Willard, retired director of the bird department at the Chicago Field Museum, where his duties included managing, preserving and cataloging the museum’s collection of 500,000 bird specimens.
“A normal night would be zero to 15 birds [mortas]. It was kind of a shocking exception to what we were used to. “In 40 years of following what’s happening at McCormick, we’ve never seen anything remotely this large.”
Scientists estimate that hundreds of millions of birds die every year from broken windows in the United States.
In a 2014 study, scientists from the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimated the number at between 365 million and 988 million birds annually.
Window strikes are a problem in almost every major American city because birds do not see clear or reflective glass and do not understand that it is a deadly barrier.
When they see plants or bushes through the windows or reflected in them, they head towards them, in clashes that cause the birds to die.
Birds that migrate at night, such as sparrows and songbirds, rely on the stars to navigate. They are attracted and disoriented by the bright lights of buildings, causing the birds to crash into windows or fly around the lights until they die of exhaustion.
“Unfortunately, this is very common. We see this in almost every major city during the spring and fall migration. This situation [em Chicago] It was a very disastrous single event, but when you put it all together [em todo o país]”It’s always been that way,” said Matt Igelski, executive director of the Chicago Audubon Society, a bird conservation society.
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