We’ve gotten lots of questions about what the birding community is doing to reduce bird mortality. Plenty! If you missed the story, there’s a great expainer about Thursday’s big bird mortality event here.
About 6 years ago, we joined with Chicago Bird Collision Monitors and Chicago Ornithological Society to form Bird Friendly Chicago, led by Annette Prince. We developed an ordinance and got a lot of support for it among council members (lots of meetings!) In a meeting we were not invited to, the decision was made to pursue an administrative solution through the Chicago Department of Planning and Development (DPD) rather than an ordinance. That was at the transition of the Emanuel and Lightfoot administration. The mechanism for this will be a mandatory action on the Sustainability Checklist which all new buildings of significant size and complexity are required to comply with. Since then, we have worked with the DPD to develop a guidebook for developers and architects explaining exactly how to meet the requirements. (Claire Halpin did a great job on this.)
DPD staff have ensured us that the checklist will be mandatory by the end of this year. They made the same promise about spring of this year, but didn’t keep it. On the plus side, the ordinance has gained much more support among developers during these past 4 years. We are hoping that the DPD announces a public process soon and we can get the regulations in place so that new buildings have bird-safe glass.
CAS has also worked with Evanston and Skokie, which both passed ordinances based on Chicago’s idea and are now requiring new buildings to have bird safe glass.
Regarding McCormick Place, despite numerous entreaties, they continue to allow their exhibitors to choose to leave the lights on all night. They just put out a statement saying they are part of the Lights Out program - technically maybe true, since Lights Out requires extinguishing exterior lighting. However they have been told many times that the collisions at their building are not caused by exterior lighting but that simply asking their exhibitors to draw curtains or turn off lights at the end of the day would prevent 80% of bird deaths. This they refuse to do.
Chicago Audubon is proud to be the coordinator of the Lights Out program. Although it is voluntary, almost all buildings in Chicago comply (although 311 Wacker, the “wedding cake” building was a notable exception on Thursday night). The number of dead birds collected Thursday night by Chicago Bird Collision monitor volunteers at all the Loop buildings they monitor was about the same as the total at one non-Lights Out compliant building, McCormick Place.
Retrofitting existing buildings with bird-friendly window films, screens, etc is the next step to greatly reduce the mortality in the Loop. We know Lights Out is working and saving lots of birds.
If you would like to be involved in this work, please contact us.