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.
