Wildlife advocates press city to better protect birds from building collisions

Chicago is the deadliest city in the U.S. for birds journeying each spring and autumn between northern locales and Florida, Mexico and Central America.

But the city has put off implementing a 2020 ordinance that would have given greater weight to bird protection measures on the list of criteria it uses to evaluate proposed new buildings. Planning officials say new standards will be released in early 2023 but provided no details. Advocates worry the measures will be toothless.

“We continue to not get a straight answer from them,” said Annette Prince, the head of Chicago Bird Collision Monitors, a volunteer group that each migratory season rescues thousands of birds, most weighing only a few ounces, injured from striking downtown’s glass-walled buildings. “We get put off when we ask direct questions.”

What happens in Chicago can affect bird populations across North America, according to scientists. Chicago sits in the middle of the migratory paths of hundreds of species attracted by the city’s bright lights, lakefront parks and open water. Birds frequently can’t see the difference between glass and sky, leading many to strike lobbies or windows overnight, an additional threat to wildlife already under pressure from habitat loss.

“The migration through the center of the country is really the biggest anywhere,” said Douglas Stotz, senior conservation ecologist with the Keller Science Action Center at Chicago’s Field Museum.

Hundreds of millions of migratory birds die each year across the U.S. in building collisions, perhaps as many as a billion, he added, and a 2019 Cornell Lab of Ornithology study found Chicago was the nation’s deadliest city for birds, just ahead of Houston and Dallas.

“What hits buildings are mostly small, land-based birds that travel at night, songbirds in particular,” Stotz said. “The idea that we kill a billion birds a year is disgraceful. It shows a total lack of respect for the natural world.”

In the 1990s conservationists started Lights Out Chicago, a campaign to persuade downtown landlords to dim exterior lights, which draw in birds at night during spring and fall migration periods. Most buildings now take part, greatly reducing collisions at once-deadly properties such as 875 North Michigan Avenue and McCormick Place’s Lakeside Center, according to Stotz.

When the 2020 ordinance was being considered, Prince and other activists wanted to mandate that new buildings and those undergoing renovations include technology such as patterned glass that birds can better see, and thus avoid deadly collisions. Building owners worried about the costs, and the ordinance was softened, calling instead for planning officials to simply give greater weight to bird protection measures when evaluating whether new projects meet the city’s sustainable development requirements.

“It was rewritten at least six times,” 2nd Ward Ald. Brian Hopkins, the ordinance’s chief sponsor, said.

Prince said the city then delayed fully enacting that policy, and even though she and other activists met with planning officials over the spring and summer to come up with acceptable language for an update to the city’s sustainable development policy, they haven’t heard anything for months.

Gabriela Jirasek, assistant commissioner of the Department of Planning and Development, said staff is still working on the update, but promised to finalize it by early 2023.

“Members of the Chicago Bird Collision Monitors, Audubon Society and other stakeholders have helped to elevate this issue and have provided language to use in the revised policy,” she stated in an email.

Prince and her volunteers stay busy on early morning walks during migrations, collecting from downtown sidewalks, plazas and alleys about 7,000 birds each year, including northern flickers, ground nesting warblers and song sparrows, recording the locations and bringing survivors to a suburban wildlife rehab center.

It’s a small percentage of the city’s total bird strikes, and the numbers of dead and injured never seem to go down, so any more delay in updating the planning department’s policy is unacceptable, said Prince, a former speech pathologist who began volunteering with the group nearly two decades ago.

“Volunteering was about not feeling hopeless, and saying nothing can be done,” she said. “I love Chicago architecture, but it was dismaying to me that it was harming birds, the other thing I love.”

“This is a continuing crisis, and it’s disappointing that Chicago has yet to do something about it,” she added. “We’re leaders in architecture and design and should be the leader in bird safety.”

Prince’s group also has its eyes on the Feb. 28 mayoral election.

“This is an issue that has been put on the back burner for years,” she said, “so, we are writing to all of the candidates, and we want to hear what they would do.”

Hopkins said the planning department’s update should be done by the first quarter of 2023 and he plans to introduce a new ordinance codifying those changes. A possible further step will be revisiting the original idea of requiring at least some new developments to include bird safety measures.

“That’s going to be part of the conversation we’re about to have,” he said.

Hopkins added that if the City Council does not propose onerous or expensive additions to new construction, he’s confident safety steps such as patterned glass will continue gaining acceptance in the development community.

“We would never ask a building to take out all the windows and replace them with something else,” he said. “And most of the architects I speak to are happy to be part of the solution.”

Property owners are taking a wait-and-see attitude.

“BOMA/Chicago is proud of our building members’ efforts to reduce bird collisions through participation in our Lights Out program,” said Amy Masters, director of government and external affairs for the Building Owners and Managers Association of Chicago. “While we welcome opportunities to work together with stakeholders to find practical solutions, we would need to review any new proposal before offering comments.”

Some developers are already taking the initiative. Sterling Bay is set to open its first building at Lincoln Yards on the North Side early next year, a 280,000-square-foot riverfront tower at 1229 W. Concord Place. Designed by Gensler and dedicated to life sciences, it will include glass designed to deter bird strikes.

Birds most often strike lower windows, according to Michael Townsend, design principal at Gensler, so glass on 1229 Concord’s first few stories has dotted patterns birds can easily see, while upper floors have less reflective glass, which birds are also less likely to hit.

“They don’t have a good sense of what is sky and what is building,” Townsend said.

Sterling Bay will also shield the property’s streetlights, which can also attract birds, among other measures.

“All this has to be a multipronged effort, and over time it will become standard practice,” Townsend said.

The special glass is about 20% more expensive than standard glass, and the patterns are somewhat visible to humans, added Matt Menna, the company’s chief design officer.

Menna said many tenants, especially ones in life sciences, want to be in buildings that protect wildlife.

“I pointed it out to a prospective tenant, and they received it well,” he said. “It resonates with everybody.”

Planning officials are pressing Sterling Bay to use environmentally sound designs for Lincoln Yards, according to Menna, and the company is exploring how to incorporate other bird-friendly measures at both the multifamily building and the office tower they’re ready to launch at Lincoln Yards next year. But the company also plans to introduce bird protection in other cities as it launches new projects in other markets.

“We hope others get on board with us,” he said.

Prince said she’s glad some developers are embracing the idea of protecting wildlife. But as projects like 1229 Concord open for business, it’s important to closely monitor the surrounding grounds for dead or injured birds, to ensure the strategies work at each location. The volunteer bird monitors were invited to do so by the city of Evanston at its new Robert Crown Community Center. The project, which includes two ice rinks and a gymnasium, opened in 2020 and used patterned glass.

“We monitored it following construction and we only found one dead bird over the entire year, and that’s a tribute to a building with that much glass,” Prince said. “It’s a challenge, but we have the means to solve the bird collision problem.”