Bright Lights, Big Mess
Others aren’t so lucky. Wysocki says he sometimes finds as many as 15 dead birds within a three-block stretch of alleyway. “I try to get down here on Sunday mornings once in a while, because the building maintenance crews aren’t out sweeping up the birds as early on Sunday.” Some workdays he’ll come in early just to prowl around for corpses. “People I work with say they’ve never seen dead birds on the sidewalk, but that’s because they’re never here until after the maintenance people have cleaned it up.”
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Chicago’s skyline will be less spectacular this month: as part of the Lights Out! program inaugurated last spring by the city’s Nature and Wildlife Subcommittee, more than a dozen skyscrapers–among them the John Hancock Center, 55 E. Monroe, the Tribune Tower, and Endsley’s 311 S. Wacker–will turn off their decorative lights during April and May, and again during September and October, to help birds pass through the city safely.
“It’s part of our look, and it’s as important to us as the Sears Tower’s size is over there,” says Endsley. “You say you work at 311 S. Wacker and people don’t necessarily know where you mean, but you say ‘the one with the white lights on top,’ and they know immediately where you are.” That distinctiveness translates into dollars too: Endsley says the building’s rental rates are among the highest in the city, between $30 and $35 a square foot. “Without the lights, we probably wouldn’t get that much.”
Diehl thinks the birds who fly into the lights of skyscrapers and high-rises are outnumbered by those who fly into the lit windows of houses and apartment buildings, but the ones who die because of skyline lights are less expendable. The ones hitting houses are “mostly birds like cardinals that live near our houses. Their populations overall are doing fine and aren’t of conservation concern. The birds that are showing signs of decline are the migrants, especially the neotropical migrants that spend the winter in the tropical regions of the Americas. These are things like flycatchers and thrushes and vireos and warblers. They’re the ones hitting tall buildings–the ones whose populations can least afford it.”
“Why not?” says Kapp of the Hancock Center. “It just seems to make sense to go along with this thing. It’s a worthy cause. Obviously the birds were migrating through here a long time before these buildings were here, so my thought is, if you can do something to help them out, what does it hurt?” He says he’s never had a tenant complain about it, and everyone who’s called to ask about it has accepted the explanation as reasonable. Some people, he thinks, may even come to expect the darkened buildings as a sign of the season, just as they look for the Hancock’s red and green lights at Christmastime.
