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.
And from the ashes, another sentient life form will evolve and repeat all our mistakes, perhaps make even worse mistakes. Instead of mass suicide, how about we focus on solving the problems you identified? There are indeed horrible humans, but there are also plenty of incredibly wonderful humans.
Because the owners have intentionally visible places for people that refuse to play ball and propagate this race to oblivion for short term profit. These places exist to serve as a warning to people like you and I to go back into making them money silently and obediently for scraps as the planet burns:
If you fight back and don’t have excess capital to sustain yourself somehow somewhere, you’ll be made into a capitalism scarecrow to serve them by publically dying of exposure and
policecapital defense force harassment. The owners aren’t waging class war, they won it handily half a century ago, under Reagan here, Thatcher in the UK, etc. This is a class occupation. That’s its own problem, but it stops us from interfering with the occupier’s interests, namely killing the planet with us on it for short term profit.