Session S0

📖Introduction

One Night. One Building. Nearly 1,000 Birds Dead.

Hundreds of dead migratory songbirds laid out in rows on metal trays at the Field Museum in Chicago after the October 2023 McCormick Place collision event. — Songbirds collected at McCormick Place after the October 4–5, 2023 collision event, laid out for cataloguing at the Field Museum.

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.

NEXRAD radar image from 5:50 a.m. on October 5, 2023 showing a mass of migrating birds (blue) colliding with heavy rain and high winds (red and pink) over the greater Chicago area. — NEXRAD image captured at 5:50 a.m. on October 5, 2023 depicts a mass of migrating birds (in blue) colliding with an area of heavy rain and high winds (in red and pink) as the birds traveled through the greater Chicago area. NEXRAD radar image courtesy NOAA/KLOT.

BirdCast altitude chart for Cook County on October 5, 2023, showing migrating birds descending from 6,500 ft around 8 PM CDT to low altitudes by 11 PM and staying low through 5 AM. — BirdCast migration data from Cook County on October 5, 2023 shows that the birds flying over Chicago descended to fly at a low altitude.

~1,000

Birds killed at McCormick Place, Oct. 4–5, 2023

988 million

Estimated annual U.S. bird deaths from window strikes

40+ years

Dave Willard has monitored collisions at McCormick Place since 1978

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.

REFLECT & RESPOND

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.

Word count: 0 / 20 minimum

FOR THE BIRDS

One Night. One Building. Nearly 1,000 Birds Dead.