📖Introduction
One Night. One Building. Nearly 1,000 Birds Dead.
On the night of October 4, 2023, a massive wave of migratory songbirds swept through Chicago. Warm weather had backed up millions of birds in Wisconsin for weeks. When the winds finally shifted, they all began moving south at once.
At McCormick Place — a massive convention center on Lake Michigan — the interior lights blazed all night. To the birds flying in darkness overhead, those lights looked like safety.
By morning, nearly 1,000 songbirds lay dead at the base of the building. In a single night. From a single building.
In this lab you'll act as a biological engineer designing a physical solution. You'll build a clay-drop model of a bird strike, test how far a screen must sit from the glass to prevent injury, then scale your results from one building to an entire city.
After reading about the Chicago bird collision event, describe the problem of bird-window collisions in your own words. Why do you think this problem is difficult to solve? Identify at least ONE factor that makes it challenging.