In just one night, more than a thousand migrating birds died after crashing into a single building in Chicago, due to what experts say was a deadly combination of migration season, difficult weather, and a lack of “bird-friendly” building measures.
Philadelphia has dimmed its skyline after a 'mass collision' killed thousands of migrating birds
The Chicago Field Museum collected more than a thousand dead birds that had collided with the McCormick Place Lakeside Center, a convention center located on the shore of Lake Michigan, Wednesday night into Thursday morning, Annette Prince, director of Chicago Bird Collision Monitors, told CNN.
Volunteers working with Chicago Bird Collision Monitors collected an additional thousand dead birds from the city’s downtown area, said Prince. And there were likely more birds that flew away after colliding into a building but later died of their injuries, she said.
“It was overwhelming and tragic to see this many birds,” Prince said. “I went to a building where, when I walked up to the building, it was like there was just a carpet of dead and dying and injured birds.”
A combination of factors likely contributed to the extraordinary number of deadly collisions, Prince said.
There was a particularly high volume of birds set to migrate south for the winter that night. The birds had been waiting for winds from the north or west to ease their journey. “Those birds essentially piled up,” Prince said. When the right winds arrived on Wednesday, a large number of birds set off for their migration at once. Additionally, “there were foggy and low cloud conditions, which can bring them into confusion with lights and buildings,” Prince said. The clouds likely caused the birds to fly at a lower altitude, bringing them closer into contact with buildings. McCormick Place in particular “is one of the first buildings birds encounter as they move along Lake Michigan,” she said.
How would you do it? Vertical prisons and pay for running lights all day with the only way to change temperatures is by HVAC vs simply closing and opening a blind?
Oh look at this free source of energy that makes people happy. Let's go get rid of it.
What are you talking about? This is a glass office building in Chicago. It will leak heat and air conditioning because it is mostly glass. It should be made from concrete or stone as those are more environmentally friendly.
Fwiw I used to live in a mostly-glass building in Chicago and the sun the winter made it so that we basically never turned the heat on. Summer heat, on the other hand - we needed A/C
Edit: I suppose it's probably relevant that while the outside was glass, the inside was concrete....
And if you were mostly concrete you might not have needed either.
Enjoy your societ-style concrete block
Why does it have to brutalist? The Empire State. Building is mostly concrete as are many buildings. What they shouldn't be is massive glass towers.
Climate change is coming and it doesn't give a fuck about your sense of aesthetics.
Da comrade