Nearly 1,000 migratory songbirds died in the early hours of Thursday to Friday after colliding with the windows of an exhibition center in Chicago, United States.
According to bird experts, the incident is the result of excellent migration conditions, rain, low lighting in the exhibit center – the McCormick Place Lakeside Center – and walls full of windows, the Associated Press (AP) reported.
David Willard has been checking the grounds of Chicago’s Lake Fairgrounds for dead birds for 40 years, but Thursday morning he was shocked by the sight he found: hundreds of dead songbirds.
“It was like a carpet of dead birds in the windows,” says Willard, retired director of the bird department at the Chicago Field Museum, where his duties included managing, preserving and cataloging the collection of 500,000 bird species.
“A normal night would be zero to 15 birds [mortas]. It was kind of a shocking exception to what we’re used to. In the 40 years we have been following what is happening in McCormick, we have never seen anything of this magnitude,” he emphasized.
Scientists estimate that hundreds of millions of birds die each year in the United States from window accidents.
In a 2014 study, scientists from the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimated the number of birds annually to be between 365 million and 988 million.
Window smashes are a problem in almost every major American city because birds do not see clear or reflective glass and do not understand that it is a deadly barrier.
When they see plants or shrubs through windows or reflected in them, they move toward them, in collisions that cause the birds’ deaths.
Birds that migrate at night, such as sparrows and warblers, rely on the stars to navigate. Bright lights from buildings attract and confuse them, causing birds to crash into windows or fly around the lights until they die of exhaustion.
“Unfortunately it happens very often. We see this in virtually every major city during the spring and fall migration. This situation [em Chicago] it was a very catastrophic event, but if you put it all together [em todo o país]it’s always like this,” said Matt Igleski, executive director of the Chicago Audubon Society, a bird conservation association.
Source: DN
