Around 1,000 songbirds died recently during night-time after they suffered a crash into US’ McCormick Place Lakeside Center’s windows amid a deadly conflux of prime migration conditions, rain and the low-slung exhibition hall’s lights and window-lined walls. David Willard, the person who had been checking the grounds of Chicago’s lakefront exhibition center for dead birds for nearly 40 years told the news agency Associated Press, “It was just like a carpet of dead birds at the windows there.”
Willard is a retired bird division collections manager at the Chicago Field Museum. His duties included administering, preserving and cataloguing the museum’s collection of 500,000 bird specimens along with searching for bird strikes as part of migration research. While talking about this event, Williard said that he had never seen anything remotely close to such a scale in his past 40 years of working. He added that a normal night would be when zero to 15 birds would die in such a manner but this was a shocking outlier for even him, reported AP News.
