Nearly 1,000 songbirds making their annual voyage for warmer weather were killed in a single night after crashing into the same building on Chicago’s waterfront.
The horrifying carnage was laid bare Thursday morning — with dead and injured birds blanketing the street surrounding the McCormick Place Lakeside Center.
“It was just like a carpet of dead birds at the windows there,” David Willard, a retired bird division collections manager at the Chicago Field Museum told the Associated Press.
Willard checks the grounds of Chicago’s lakefront exhibition center during migration season for dead birds.
“A normal night would be zero to 15 (dead) birds. It was just kind of a shocking outlier to what we’ve experienced … In 40 years of keeping track of what’s happening at McCormick, we’ve never seen anything remotely on that scale.”
Avian experts collected 964 dead birds across 33 species, mostly warblers, along with an estimated 80 stunned live ones, according to the National Audubon Society, a bird activist organization.
The tragic event appears to be a combination of high-intensity migration, adverse weather conditions for flying, and the bright lights emitted from the 583,000-square-foot glass McCormick Place.
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