A Chicago real estate company has shelled out $1.2 million for a sophisticated suite of decals that will deter birds from crashing into glass windows.
McCormick Place was alerted by local wildlife advocates that the glass facade of its Lakeside Center building had, during a single night in the autumn migration season, fatally attracted 1,000 birds to fly into it.
McCormick Place is the largest convention center in North America, and the total area of the Lakeside Center’s glass exterior—just one of its five buildings—is 2.6 acres.
The Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority which runs McCormick Place, got in touch with Feather Friendly Technologies, a Toronto-based firm that manufactures a special adhesive film to coat the outside of a building’s glass facade with white dots—invisible to the human eye—but which can be seen by passing birds.
The dots help the birds’ eyesight distinguish between the solid glass and empty air.
“There was a lot of staff and logistics involved in the installation and several lifts and boom trucks,” says Paul Groleau, vice president of Feather Friendly Technologies.
It took several teams several weeks to apply it to the whole center, whereupon it was pulled down after a few days leaving behind the dots on the glass.
“When we learned of the reported mass collision event last year, we knew that we needed to quickly make additional improvements to protect local and migratory birds as they pass McCormick Place,” Larita Clark, CEO of the authority, told ENR News Record.
Local urban wildlife researchers say that the Lakeside Center has been attracting birds to their deaths for decades, and the window treatment will make a huge difference in the number of migratory birds that pass through Chicago safely.
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McCormick Place is also a part of Lights Out Chicago, a metropolitan program between building managers to make the night skies in the city during the autumn migratory period significantly darker by turning off as much exterior lighting as possible.
GNN has reported on these programs in other American cities and the outsized difference they can make in the number of bird-building collisions that occur as birds migrate south for the winter.
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Birds’ eyes are adapted to flying at night, and the reflection of lights off of glass windows can overly confuse them.
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