As the building’s lighting patterns began to vary more, he began gathering data on which windows were illuminated each night, in addition to collecting the birds he found on the pavement. Willard collects the birds’ bodies and brings them back to the museum, where he records each one in a ledger and adds them to the museum’s collection.Ībout 20 years ago, Willard began to notice a pattern: On nights when the lights were out at McCormick Place, around holidays or construction work, there were fewer birds on the ground the next morning. 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 co-author 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.
Image credit: Roger Hart/University of Michigan Photography. White-throated sparrows from the Field Museum’s collections, gathered after crashing into windows in Chicago. “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 said.
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. Benjamin Winger, an assistant professor in the University of Michigan Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and assistant curator at the Museum of Zoology, is a senior author. The study is scheduled for publication June 7 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “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.” “Our research provides the best evidence yet that migrating birds are attracted to building lights, often causing them to collide with windows and die,” said Benjamin Van Doren, a postdoctoral associate at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the paper’s first author.
University of Michigan evolutionary biologist Benjamin Winger with some of the migratory songbirds from the Field Museum’s collections, gathered after crashing into windows in Chicago.
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