Around North America, Community Members Are Stitching 10,000 Fabric Birds

Birds migrate north in spring to nest and breed and return south in winter to feed and raise young. BirdCast tracking showed record numbers of birds moving across the U.S., including about one billion birds on a single October night in 2023. During the night of October 4 to 5, nearly 1,000 birds died in Chicago after hitting a building. McCormick Place Lakeside Center, with many windows along Lake Michigan, reflects surrounding greenery, leading birds to mistake reflections for real habitat. After learning about the collision, artist and educator Holly Greenberg created Bird Collisions in the Anthropocene in 2024 to address the problem through a multi-year effort.

"Birds, insects, fish, and other mammals head north in the spring to nest and breed and return south in the winter to feed and raise their young. Using BirdCast, a tool that's active seasonally and allows anyone to see bird migration "heat maps" around the U.S., ornithologists tracked a record-breaking one billion birds migrating on a single October night in 2023 (last year, that number reached 1.2 billion)."

"But on the night spanning October 4 to 5, something else really big happened: nearly 1,000 birds died in Chicago after hitting a single building. McCormick Place Lakeside Center is situated along the Lake Michigan shoreline, set apart from many other buildings in a park-like space, and it has roughly enough windows to cover two football fields. As birds cruise along the shore, flitting over greenery, they sometimes mistake the reflections of nature in glass for the real thing."

"On the morning of October 5, hundreds of birds fell victim to architecture. When artist and educator Holly Greenberg heard this news, she was stunned. No stranger to nature and long interested in sustainability and the environment, she was nevertheless totally unaware of the scale of bird collisions in the U.S. During a day out in a Chicagoland arboretum, during a sabbatical from her role as assistant professor at Syracuse University, she worked with a group to remove invasive buckthorn and make room for native trees."

"A fellow volunteer rued the sad irony of planting new bird habitat when the feathered creatures try to fly into their reflections in glass instead. "That was the first time that I'd heard that these birds were crashing into windows in Chicago," Greenberg says. When she later read about the mass collision at McCormick Place, she thought, "Oh man, something needs to be done." That's when the multi-year project Bird Collisions in the Anthropocene was born."

Read at Colossal