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David Willard has been checking the grounds of Chicago’s lakefront exhibition center for dead birds for 40 years. On Thursday morning he found something horrible: Hundreds of dead songbirds, so thick they looked like a carpet.
Nearly 1,000 songbirds perished during the night after crashing into the McCormick Place Lakeside Center ‘s windows, the result, according to avian experts, of a deadly confluence of prime migration conditions, rain and the low-slung exhibition hall’s lights and window-lined walls.
“It was just like a carpet of dead birds at the windows there,” said Willard, a retired bird division collections manager at the Chicago Field Museum, where his duties included administering, preserving and cataloging the museum’s collection of 500,000 bird specimens as well as searching for bird strikes as part of migration research.
“A normal night would be zero to 15 (dead) birds. It was just kind of a shocking outlier to what we’ve experienced,” Willard said. “In 40 years of keeping track of what’s happening at McCormick, we’ve never seen anything remotely on that scale.”
apnews.com
Nearly 1,000 songbirds perished during the night after crashing into the McCormick Place Lakeside Center ‘s windows, the result, according to avian experts, of a deadly confluence of prime migration conditions, rain and the low-slung exhibition hall’s lights and window-lined walls.
“It was just like a carpet of dead birds at the windows there,” said Willard, a retired bird division collections manager at the Chicago Field Museum, where his duties included administering, preserving and cataloging the museum’s collection of 500,000 bird specimens as well as searching for bird strikes as part of migration research.
“A normal night would be zero to 15 (dead) birds. It was just kind of a shocking outlier to what we’ve experienced,” Willard said. “In 40 years of keeping track of what’s happening at McCormick, we’ve never seen anything remotely on that scale.”
Nearly 1,000 migrating songbirds perish after crashing into windows at Chicago exhibition hall
Almost 1,000 migrating songbirds have perished after smashing into windows at an exhibition center on Chicago's lakefront.
apnews.com
