Some days there are just a few birds that hit McCormick Place’s glass windows other times, there are hundreds. Willard and his colleagues, including Field Museum coauthor Mary Hennen and volunteers from the Chicago Bird Collision Monitors, have visited the site every day before sunrise during migration season, sometimes as early as 3:30 in the morning. “I might not have gone back if I hadn’t found anything that first day, and now here we are, 40 years later and 40,000 birds later.” “I went down early one morning, just out of curiosity, and wandered around and actually found four or five dead birds,” Willard says. In 1978, Willard, the Field Museum’s collections manager emeritus, heard an offhand remark about birds hitting the McCormick Place, North America’s largest convention center, which is a mile south of the museum. “These insights were only possible thanks to over 40 years of work by David Willard at the Field Museum, who led collisions and light monitoring efforts.” ‘40,000 birds later’ “Our research provides the best evidence yet that migrating birds are attracted to building lights, often causing them to collide with windows and die,” says Benjamin Van Doren, a postdoctoral associate at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and first author of the paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Using decades’ worth of data and birds collected by Field Museum scientists at Chicago’s McCormick Place convention center, researchers found that on nights when half the windows were darkened, there were 11 times fewer bird collisions during spring migration and six times fewer collisions during fall migration than when all the windows were lit. Darkening just half of a building’s windows can make a big difference for migrating birds, a new study shows.Įvery night during the spring and fall migration seasons, thousands of birds are killed when they crash into illuminated windows, disoriented by the light.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |