Billions of birds collide with glass buildings - but architecture has solutions

Paul Dobraszczyk After more than 1,000 birds died flying into a Chicago building in one day in October, Dr Paul Dobraszczyk (UCL Bartlett School of Architecture) breaks down the most effective methods for preventing bird strikes on tall buildings in The Conversation. At least 1,000 birds were killed in one day in early October, when they collided with a single Chicago building, McCormick Place - the largest convention centre in North America. A paradigm of architectural modernism, McCormick Place was built in stages from 1960 to 2017, and is a steel, concrete and glass behemoth. Although not particularly tall by contemporary standards, the building's almost unbroken glass facade presents a problem for birds, most notably at night when the brilliantly lit interiors cause them to become confused. The thousand killed that day were a small proportion of the millions of migratory birds that were moving southwards across the continent to their wintering grounds - a journey undertaken twice yearly by these animals. What makes this mass bird death unusual isn't the number of animals that died (the American Bird Conservancy estimates that up to a billion birds suffer the same fate every year), but that it garnered so much public attention. This was thanks to the Chicago Bird Collision Monitors, a volunteer group that has recorded bird strikes in the city since 2003.