McCormick Place in Chicago Found a Way to Reduce Bird Deaths

The morning promised to be deadly.

High above Chicago, in the predawn dark, flew an airborne river of migratory birds. It was peak spring migration traffic, in late April, and the tiny travelers were arriving at one of the most perilous points along their journey.

These birds, inhabitants of forests and grasslands, do not perceive glass as solid and get confused by its reflections. Bright city lights seem to attract them, luring them into glassy canyons. The gleaming buildings of Chicago, curving along the shore of Lake Michigan, are especially lethal.

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A call went out to volunteers across the city: Be ready to hit the streets early to rescue the injured and document the dead.

But at the building that has long been the city’s most notorious bird killer, a sprawling lakefront conference venue that claimed almost a thousand birds on a single day in October 2023, new protections were in place.

The vast glass windows and doors of the building, called Lakeside Center at McCormick Place, are overlaid with a pattern of close, opaque dots. Applied last summer to help birds perceive the glass, the treatment’s early results are nothing short of remarkable. During fall migration, deaths were down by about 95 percent when compared with the two previous autumns.

Now monitoring is underway during the first spring migration since the dots, with implications for glassy structures far beyond Chicago. Across North America, with Toronto an early leader, a growing number of bird-friendly policies and decisions by individual building managers are helping make cities safer for birds.

On that recent morning, David Willard, an ornithologist at the Field Museum, set off on a lakefront path toward McCormick Place. Known as the Bird Man to workers there, Dr. Willard has been tallying the building’s avian victims for almost 50 years.