Bird-Unfriendly Chicago to Become Less Perilous for its Winged Travelers

The Chicago skyline, located on a major flight route for migratory birds, kills thousands of these winged commuters each year. Now the city is taking measures to help prevent birds from slamming into its buildings.

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The glass and steel skyline of Chicago rises just off the shore of Lake Michigan, creating a deadly wall of architecture that kills more birds during migration than any other city in the nation. Due to the lake’s location on a major flight route, an estimated 5 million birds make their way across and along the water to Chicago each migratory season. Thousands make it no further.

Attracted to both lights and reflections mimicking the sky, flocks flying up to 60 miles per hour collide into the buildings and fall to their death. It’s a relatively quiet slaughter: The only clues being the slight, still bodies later seen on window ledges, terraces and at the feet of pedestrians walking the streets below.

But after decades of being the nation’s avian death capital, Chicago is investing in saving its winged commuters. Over the next two years, the city will move forward with more than $10 million worth of bird-friendly projects. By 2015 it will be home to more protective bird habitats than any other city in the country.

One of the more ambitious projects begins next month when the Chicago Park District, aided by hundreds of volunteers, will plant 125,000 native oaks and fruit-bearing shrubs in one day along the new Burnham Wildlife Corridor. The 40-acre swath of plantings running from 31st to 47th streets snakes between already restored shoreline, bustling Lake Shore Drive and a railway track. The open space will link with the McCormick Bird Sanctuary, a prairie built on an underground parking garage in 2003.

Birds flying into Chi-town won’t “have to expend as much energy looking for the things they need,” says Zhanna Yermakov, manager of resource conservation for The Chicago Park District. “The cover provides an area in which they can both hide and rest.” Insects to snack on will be drawn to the flowering plants.

As plants mature, the Burnham swath will attract everything from warblers, woodcocks and even owls, says Doug Stotz, a conservation ecologist at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History who also consults the city’s Nature and Wildlife Committee.

Birds, after all, continue to fly a migratory route hardwired into their systems at a time when Chicago was still a marsh. What they knew, Stotz says, “disappeared under the layers of asphalt and concrete.”

It took until the 1960s, after the grey, X-braced John Hancock observatory and tower shot into the sky, for Chicago to realize modernity was killing birds.

The city was the first in the country to start a “lights out” program, urging management companies to keep buildings dark during migratory seasons. It wasn’t enough. Dave Willard, a biologist specializing in ornithology at the Field Museum, says he would hear the thud of migratory birds slamming against the glass of the McCormick Place convention center before it adopted a lights-out policy.

Willard has been collecting the kills to use in research for more than 30 years, heading out to McCormick Place each migratory season before dawn to gather the dead and injured.

“Before sunrise on heavy migration days there will have been a high number of strikes,” says Annette Prince, head of the Collision Bird Monitors, founded in 2003. “That’s when we find birds, groups of them, dead and injured, laying in front of windows, in front of lobbies, in alleys, in the middle of the street… we see them on every street corner and we find as many as several hundred birds in one morning.”

Both avid birders and collision monitors — volunteers who rise before dusk to collect — have urged the city to take steps to create more lakefront habitat, providing islands of respite and food for the weary, winged travelers. Go only as far as the city’s famed Millennium Park to see the fruit of this advocacy: The yellow-marked heads of white-throated sparrows flitting through thickets of prairie grasses.

Today initiatives are even more ambitious, ranging from rejuvenating natural habitat — prairies, savannah and woodlands in city parks and along the banks of the Chicago River — to larger-scale projects.

Slightly south of the city, yet still close to Lake Michigan’s shore, is the start of the 300-acre Millennium Reserve project. There, acres of land surrounding a former steel mill are slowly being returned to wetlands and marsh, attracting endangered nesting birds such as the Black-crowned Night Heron. The cleanup of slag and other remnants of illegal dumping is estimated to take five years, Yermakov says.

The city has also purchased 20.5 acres north of the city, land that once part of the Rosehill Cemetery, which the Park District is restoring to woods and wetland, further adding cover for migrating birds.

Perhaps the most unique initiative includes the planting of native grasses and shrubs on many of Chicago 24 public beaches, giving sunbathers an opportunity to bird watch as they catch rays.

Chicago architect Jeanne Gang and her firm Studio Gang Architects are creating a migratory sanctuary on Northerly Island, a peninsula jutting out into the lake that once served as a small airport known as Meigs Field. Gang plans for the 91-acre island to become a bird habitat, planted with native trees and shrubs that provide food and shelter for migratory flocks, as well as 19 acres of wetland.

Gang has a thing for birds — she keeps abandoned nests in her office and easily names habitats that they favor. “As cities take back some of the industrial areas, there will be great opportunity to reintroduce ecological systems,” she says. “Ones that will both serve as habitats and also deliver ecosystem services.”

When completed, Gang’s sanctuary will harken back to what Chicago looked like before the skyline erupted on its shores.

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Lori Rotenberk is an award-winning journalist based in Chicago. Her work appears on Grist and Civil Eats. She’s written for the Boston Globe and the New York Times and was a staff reporter at the Chicago Sun-Times.

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Tags: chicagoparkspublic spacearchitecture

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