Birds are Chicago’s Iconic Wildlife

Manifesto For a Mandatory Bird-Safe Building Ordinance

Yellow-rumped Warbler. Humboldt Park, September 30, 2022. Photo by Alex Muench.

words by David Hoyt

Birds are, I submit, Chicago’s iconic wildlife. Our city’s buildings should therefore be designed to accommodate them, not destroy them.

Birds should be central to our identity in Chicago as post-glacial sojourners of the Mississippi Flyway. They should be the subject of as much scientific attention as the subatomic particles at Fermilab or the guts of nuclear reactors at Argonne. They should be honored by as much legal protection as needed to keep them from dying in great numbers in collisions with buildings tall and short, and as much protection as they are entitled to by way of the federal Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918. It has been criminal to kill migratory birds for over a century. Yet this is what our vaunted architecture does every day.

Birds are as much a part of Chicago as anything you care to mention—the architecture, the Stockyards, or the Sanitary and Ship Canal. They are to Chicago what manatees are to coastal Florida, what wolves are to Yellowstone, what moose are to Northern Minnesota, and what grizzlies are to Alaska. The fact that so many of them die in building collisions demonstrates a gross and ethically dubious disregard for a class of animals of vital ecological significance. The annual spring and fall migration of dozens of species presents one of the greatest natural spectacles in the region, and symbolizes what Chicago has always been: a cosmopolitan place that brings together, on an improbable strip of marshy lakefront, migrants from around the world.

This proposition may sound odd, because Chicago can seem devoid of any wildlife at all. But this has never been true. Leonard Dubkin was a Jewish immigrant from Ukraine who showed an interest in butterflies and writing in the early twentieth century. Jane Addams gave him a typewriter, and he went on to become the forefather of urban ecology, building a career with essays on humble animals such as squirrels, pigeons, and crickets. Growing up on Chicago’s West Side, he did not see a tree until he was nine years old. He was fascinated by the vitality of creatures that could survive amidst a city of pavement and rough edges.

Not everyone sees the world as Dubkin did. In a city devoted to industry, to logistics, to yards of rail and broad stretches of highway, nature itself can seem trivial. Wildlife, in a popular view, exists only where we have given Nature space to hold it: out West, in Alaska, on the coasts.

The events of the October 2023 migration fallout, in which a rapidly changing weather system on a night of very high bird movement forced thousands of birds to rapidly descend to earth, confirmed Dubkin’s conviction that nature is before our eyes even in the largest cities. By now, most birders and a lot of non-birders nationwide know of the high avian death toll from bird strikes at McCormick Place on the morning of October 5. The building was long been kept dangerously illuminated during early morning hours of peak migration activity. (Management now promises to correct this practice.) In combination with its location on the lakefront, this made McCormick Place a death trap during the fallout.

As terrible as this was, it is worth recalling the magic of those first moments across the city, when many of us experienced the migration of animals on a scale that normally transpires thousands of feet above our heads. For a few hours on the morning of October 5, that flow was diverted down and over our back decks, our driveways, past our windows, along the lakefront, or wherever we happened to be. The idea that Nature is elsewhere was conclusively debunked then and there. An atmospheric river of life descended to the visible from the invisible. It made clear that this flow of life continues to find its course through our landscape, as it has for thousands of years.

To see one bird is a joy. To encounter hundreds and thousands in a state of urgency is an experience worthy of profound reflection. We are not the only ones using this space. It has not been evacuated of everything and everyone whose purposes do not match our own. As great roads and railways pass through this junction, so too do the itineraries of great numbers of birds.

We should adjust our cities to take account of this shared use of the world, in a sort of inter-species retrocession of livable space. It is what Jens Jensen called for a century ago. It is not hard to do. The costs are not onerous, and the tricks we use to do so benefit people as well. The tree that the young Leonard Dubkin did not encounter on the West Side of Chicago could have cooled sidewalks and tenements as well as supported a bird’s nest in breeding season. Our buildings must shelter us while also acknowledging, respecting, and accommodating the ancient usages of migrating birds.

The events of October 5 sent us a message from a different class of animals: We are here. We need Chicago. What Chicago needs is an ordinance that enforces effective bird-safety features on new construction and old, with accountability for violations that kill birds, our iconic wildlife.