Bird migration is epic and the really cool thing to really understand about bird migration is –
there are birds that travel across our globe.
They go from north to south, huge distances.
Birds are a lot like airplanes, right?
When you get on an airplane, you know, there's got to be more than one GPS unit on there, right?
Because if one goes down, you’ve got to have the other one to get home, right?
Or to get wherever you're going.
Birds have the same thing.
Some subsets of birds migrate during the night.
That's just what they do.
And what's cool is they use things like stars to navigate.
So, they actually use the constellations.
So even that side of migration is pretty epic – basically,
birds have a map and a compass to be able to find their way where they're going.
My name is Jason Weckstein.
I am curator of ornithology at the Academy of Natural Sciences at Drexel University.
And I'm also an Associate Professor in the Department of Biodiversity,
Earth, and Environmental Science.
And, in fact, when I was walking my dog a little while ago, I heard blackpoll warblers singing outside.
And blackpoll warbler is one of these epic, neotropical migrants.
And it has this really weird circular migration where, in the fall, it jumps off the Atlantic coast
and flies in a single flight across the Atlantic Ocean to South America without stopping.
And this is a little, teeny bird, you know.
I don't know, 25–30 grams, I can't remember the exact weight, but it's a very small, little bird.
So imagine crossing the Atlantic Ocean, right?
You're a bird this big, you got to put on a ton of fat.
And then they're gonna fly overnight, during the night, to get to the next spot.
And, obviously, when they fly across the Gulf of Mexico, lots of them don't make it.
Or when they fly across the Atlantic Ocean, lots of them don't make it.
So it's a pretty deadly dangerous and epic phenomenon as things are.
Then you add to that the built environment, you add to that feral and outdoor cats – if you let your cat outside,
you are killing huge numbers of birds.
In fact, that's actually the biggest killer; buildings are the second killer.
So cats are killing 2.4 billion birds a year in the United States, right? Or in North America.
Then we add buildings to it.
And buildings are, you know, 365 million to a billion birds a year in North America.
In Chicago, it's an epic, epic, epic problem.
So the Field Museum has, you know, nearly 40,000 specimens from one building since the 1970s.
It's a building on the Lake Shore in Chicago called McCormick Place.
And I think when most people imagine a building that kills a lot of birds, they think about skyscrapers.
This is a low building, but it's a low building right on the Lake Shore.
And it has a lot of glass.
So David Willard, who is the Collections Manager at the Field Museum,
started walking around that building in the spring in the fall every day.
And what he found was that when the shades were drawn, and the lights were off,
not many birds were killed on the windows,
and that when they were open and when the lights were on, lots of birds were killed.
Well, I mean, I think it's huge amounts of glass.
It is lights that weren't there before.
Birds get confused in other ways by those lights.
So birds sing earlier in the morning.
So, if you wake up, at three in the morning, here in the United States,
you're gonna hear American robins sing.
So, it's the lights in the glass, principally, that are affecting things.
And also, the fact is, these birds need habitat, right?
They need a place to go to eat,
they need trees, they need vegetation.
I mean, Chicago, Toronto, Cleveland are big cities,
New York City also runs into this – any cities on the water are going to have even bigger,
epic kills due to, you know, weather events.
When I was in Chicago, we would see a couple big kills, like the one that we saw in October a year.
So here [in Philadelphia], it's less frequent than that.
But a lot of this depends on weather.
So it's, you know, it's very stochastic when that's gonna happen.
And the reality is, we can't afford to needlessly wipe things out at this point on the planet.
What we're doing in Philly is lights are going out at midnight through the morning.
So the lights are on, you know, the beginning of the night,
but that's not, in general, going to be affecting these migratory birds.
So, basically, the lights go out during that period that we think is probably the most sensitive period
when they're going to come lower and come in and ultimately into some area
and have this possibility of being attracted to these lights.
So I think that's one step in the right direction.
The other thing is treating glass.
And obviously, it's a lot harder to treat glass that's already there.
And there are lots of different ways of doing it.
The little hawk stickers and falcon stickers, not that good apparently.
You really want something that really covers the entire glass, in a way,
and you can do spots, so they're like little dots that you put spaced apart.
And they make stickers that you can see through from the inside, but on the outside,
something would be able to see it, right?
And then there's a special kind of glass called fritted glass.
And honestly, that's really the best place to go is to actually build a building with bird safe glass.
That's really what you want to do.