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.
Why are we making buildings that are mostly glass? Are we convinced climate change isn't real still?
Do you want to work in a windowless office for 9-10 hours a day, 5 days a week? I'm not saying we can't shrink the windows down, but having worked in a building with very few windows for way too long, it begins to feel like a jail cell extremely quickly.
Isn't it also more ecological to have good natural lighting?
Not when the trade off is a mostly glass building. Temperature control takes more energy than light.
I mean yeah but doesn't solar heating more space naturally also cut back?
Not enough to offset the increased AC use to offset the fact the building is made of glass. We really should stop making buildings like this.
Everyone knows it's real at some level, most just delude themselves into believing/hoping it won't be their problem, as is human tradition.
There's capitalist profit to be made, after all.
I just wish we could leave a giant, titanium gravestone the size of a skyscraper for future dolphin archeologists that reads "Humanity: for one shining moment in time, we generated a lot of money for shareholders!" Because that's all we cared about, to our own extinction, and I'd like that to be the only discoverable fact about our species by any future sapient species. I want the insatiable greed and greed worship that defined humanity to ourselves to be our epitaph.
Positive psychological impact of sunlight is my guess
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