Palm Warbler. Montrose Point, May 6, 2023. Photo by Dustin Weidner

words by Robyn Detterline

Palm Warblers are not often a bird birders gush over. In fall especially, they are not a particularly perky shade of yellow, and above they are a dull brown, lacking the rusty cap that gives them a slightly distinctive feature to shine in the spring. They do pump their tails in any season, which makes them one of the first warblers birders learn to confidently identify. I think their familiarity, combined with their ubiquitous appearance in urban parks in peak migration, makes them one of the more overlooked warblers.

But on the morning of October 5, 2023, they descended upon Chicago in a big way, and the sheer number of them awed birders across the city. The question I, and many others, had was “HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO GET ANY WORK DONE TODAY WITH ALL THESE DORBS PALM WARBLERS IN MY YARD????????”

Tennessee Warbler. Chicago Women’s Park, September 21, 2023. Photo by Carl Giometti.

My little Chicago backyard only had about a dozen; Nathan Goldberg counted a few more, estimating over 30,000 from his back porch. In addition to Palm Warblers, Yellow-rumped Warblers and Tennessee Warblers were inundating the Lake Michigan shoreline, as well as shorebirds, thrushes, kinglets, waxwings, and sparrows galore. The whole city buzzed, and birders who were not already in the field flocked to be a part of the spectacle.

Many, like myself, however, were work-bound and stuck inside our offices, trying to limit our checks of social media and other networks to live vicariously through the reports coming in. Then, around 2 p.m., Daryl Coldren, collections assistant in the bird division at the Field Museum, posted those infamous images of hundreds of dead birds laid out in the museum’s prep lab to Dead Birds 4 Science!, a private Facebook group for identifying and documenting dead birds followed by many in the bird collision monitoring community. The images began trickling to other platforms, and as word of the tragedy unfolding at McCormick Place spread, our collective joy turned to horror.

Behind the scenes, however, the tragedy unfolding was already apparent to those on the front lines, the Chicago Bird Collision Monitors (CBCM), by sunrise. Early that morning the Thursday monitoring team sent out an SOS to all monitors, reporting downtown was already overflowing with dead and injured birds. The group needed to make multiple trips to DuPage Wildlife Conservation Center (formerly Willowbrook Wildlife Center) to deliver bags and bags of injured birds. By the end of the day, CBCM had collected over 2,000 dead and injured birds, making the total casualties of the morning of October 5, 2023 over 3,000 birds. The total was likely much, much higher.

At McCormick Place, of the nearly 1,000 dead birds collected, 335 were Palm Warblers. People often wonder what makes certain species more susceptible to window collisions—perhaps the biggest factor is simply that the more individuals of a certain species are in an area dense with glass, the more likely that species is to collide. If one day hundreds of thousands of Bald Eagles migrated through Chicago and were trying to hunt on the river, we’d likely wake up to hundreds of dead Bald Eagles on the sidewalks. But on the night of October 4–5, 2023, Palm Warblers, those tiny, tail-pumping borbs we delighted in that morning, made up a large mass of the total birds moving, and so a great many of the victims of collisions that day were Palm Warblers.

The mass casualty event in Chicago that day became an international news event, and McCormick Place began to experience pressure from the global public, whereas the issue of bird collisions at its Lakeside Center, well documented for 40 years, had previously been a concern mostly limited to those in the Chicago birding community. A petition asking McCormick Place to turn off its lights or draw its shades every night during migration gathered over 10,000 signatures. Bird Friendly Chicago (BFC), of which COS is a part, met with Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority (MPEA) and McCormick Place to discuss the issue.

BFC suggested solutions, including treatment to make the glass visible to birds, and urged the MPEA to implement them by March 15, 2024, in time for the next migration season. MPEA gave no timeline or commitment, and spring came and went without any changes to the building, although McCormick did turn off its lights and keep its shades drawn. Then in May, Feather Friendly announced it had partnered with McCormick Place to supply its signature dot films for a bird-friendly retrofit of the Lakeside Center. The $1.2 million installation was completed in September. This update is a huge win for birds; early results during 2024 fall migration suggest that the unassuming dots have reduced collisions by 94 percent at McCormick Place.

Song Sparrow found downtown Chicago the morning of October 4, 2023. This bird, and thousands like him, was not killed by McCormick Place.

It would seem that, after tens of thousands of casualties, birds finally won a battle in Chicago, but those fighting for them continue to lose the war. McCormick Place is just one building. What about the other buildings downtown that killed 2,000 birds the night of October 4? They kill thousands of birds every year. McCormick Place was a dramatic case, and thus it caught the attention of news media and the general public; the death by a thousand cuts, which is the reality of bird collisions at large, is much less intriguing for these audiences. While there are some signs that fear of becoming the next McCormick Place is encouraging building managers to make their own retrofits, the fact is that retrofits are costly, and thus it may very well take 1,000 dead birds in one night to convince the fat cats to make changes.

BFC has realized all along that pressuring one building at a time to change will not work, neither will pressuring one developer at a time to make their new buildings bird friendly. The most efficient strategy would be a legislative change; unfortunately, the city of Chicago has not seemed very interested in making any real steps to codify bird friendly design as a legal obligation.

BFC had been reaching for low-hanging fruit: making bird friendly design mandatory in the Department of Planning’s Sustainable Development Policy (SDP). This policy applies to developers who are getting breaks from the city: in exchange for rezoning or TIF money, they have to make their buildings sustainable by choosing from a menu of options, such as green roofs, renewable energy, or EV charging stations. Despite a large push from the local birding and conservation community, bird protection remained optional in the 2024 SDP.

As such, BFC has set its sights once again on pushing for a fully realized bird friendly design ordinance, along the lines of Local Law 15 passed by New York. The start of this push will be a hearing on bird-friendly design, sponsored by alderpeople Maria Hadden (49), Brian Hopkins (2), and Ruth Cruz (30), tentatively scheduled for December.

What to do in the meantime? The glacial pace of progress in the city is a little maddening, especially considering other cities, like New York, Washington, D.C., Madison, and even Evanston, are making changes while Chicago, the deadliest city for birds, continues to sit on its hands. Even as a bird collision monitor, I feel helpless. The majority of the birds I find are dead; while I know salvaging the lost is important for research, sometimes I can’t help but wonder what the point is. I’ve been bearing witness for eight years; I’ve been sharing photos, stories, and information to anyone who will listen, and it can feel as if all the work has been for nothing.

But as our nation and world comes increasingly unhinged, as the climate and ecological crises continue to spiral and days pass with little meaningful action on a large scale, I find sanity and inspiration in thinking hyper-local. It begins with our own homes. I’ve installed Feather Friendly film on my windows, and if access and cost is no issue to you, I urge you to please do so as well. Downtown skyscrapers get all the attention, but the fact is that over 99 percent of bird collisions take place at low-rise buildings, including 44 percent at residential buildings. If we, albeit unscientifically, extrapolate those figures, on the night of October 4–5, 2023, our Chicago homes killed 132,000 birds.

The effect of homes killing birds is cumulative. Your house might only kill a bird or two each year, but if all our houses kill a bird or two each year, it adds up quickly. Is saving the one or two birds that may die at your home each year worth the time and effort of installing protective films or screens? I suppose that is for each of us to decide. For myself, I think of the one Chestnut-sided Warbler that collided with one of my windows a few years back, before I had made the window bird-friendly. If he had gone on to have two breeding seasons, he could have been pops to perhaps six babies. Each of those babies could have had six of their own chicks: that’s thirty-six Chestnut-sided Warblers. If each of those chicks had six of their own…well, you get the picture.

Plus, I honestly think the dots on my windows are very cute. I’m sure you will think so, and so will your neighbors. It gets the conversation going and the word spreading.

So while Chicago the city does nothing, Chicago the people can do much. We can fix our own homes, we can call our alderpeople, we can share information with our neighbors. We can love birds, and share our love with others. The fact is the message of bird-friendly design is spreading across the country, just as the birding hobby is. It would be disappointing and shameful for the city of Chicago to lag behind other municipalities any longer. But it would be rewarding and honorable if its citizens never gave up, kept working, and kept caring for the dorbs Palm Warblers in their own backyards.

A Year of Nights Later