https://www.biographic.com/city-of-glass/?utm_source=join1440&utm_medium=email
Solutions
10.31.2023
City of Glass
- Meet the dedicated cadre of experts and volunteers working to protect birds from glass in the window-strike capital of the United States.
Story by Ben Goldfarb
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The film seemed to be working: Collisions at the Kellogg Hub had declined by half, and for 20 minutes I watched red-winged blackbirds (Agelaius phoeniceus) alight easily on its railings and roof. Even better, at the nearby Frances Searle Building, whose windows the university had covered with faint horizontal stripes, bird deaths had virtually ceased. Yet the projects had been neither cheap nor perfect. The Searle Building alone had cost the university $250,000 to retrofit, and large swaths of the Kellogg Center remained unprotected. Retrofitting existing buildings is crucial, no doubt; Chicago isn’t about to dismantle its existing skyline for the sake of birds. Still, “the best solutions are the ones that are designed into the building from the beginning,” Claire Halpin, a landscape architect who sat on the board of the Chicago Ornithological Society until her recent death, told me later.
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Not everyone was so receptive. During our rounds, Prince and I passed the Bank of America Tower, where three trees beckoned to birds from behind glass so clear it was surprising more humans didn’t hit it face-first. Prince had begged the building’s sustainability officer to put up a patterned film, or move the trees, or even hang a temporary banner during migration season — to do literally anything. “The answer,” she told me, “was ‘no, no, and no.’”
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Maybe we all can put some political pressure on BOA to address the problem?
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Reinke Faces Life 