The glass at McCormick Place in Chicago is a lethal obstacle for birds | Hacker News Reader

The glass at McCormick Place in Chicago is a lethal obstacle for birds

theguardian.com

262 pointsc420117 comments

I worked in a building that attempted to address this. The three-story glass lobby had its glass wall raked outwards by 30*. If you approached the glass from inside then your feet would contact it before your face, which really helped at night when outside was brighter than the interior. And birds on the outside would see a reflection of the ground rather than transparent glass. All seemed good. Until a convention of blind people booked the lobby for a meeting. When they approached the building from the outside, their canes did not detect the glass wall prior to their faces smacking into it. We hurriedly erected foot-high barriers so their canes has something to see before impact.

Do blind people not have feet? I’m confused by the geometry of this story.

On the inside your feet would meet the wall first. On the outside your head would. They were outside.

They’re talking about the two groups approaching the raked wall from the inside versus the outside.

Ah I missed that thanks!

The ground floor really doesn't need to be like the rest.

Maybe 30° is too aggressive. 10-15 probably suffices and is still cane compatible. Plus no assholes trying to climb the glass on the inside.

huh, if anything, I wouldn't have imagined birds smacking into windows on first floor...

Many buildings are deliberately designed with mirrored glass on the first floor and lots of trees so that they can "blend in" with the urban landscape and look more "natural", less "artificial".

What's interesting is that what we as humans consider more natural is actually antithetical to nature, because when the birds see the reflected trees, they can't parse that it's a reflection and fly straight into it -- leading to bird deaths.

Yes birds mainly fly into my house windows when they see good reflections of the trees in the garden, in the windows.

The Toronto Best Practice for Bird-Friendly building design [0] states that “due to the lack of scientific evidence supporting its effectiveness, angled glass is no longer an acceptable way of compliance [for bird safety]”.

[0] https://www.toronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/8d1c-Bird-... Page 30.

there's supposed to be a cane detection rail if the overhead surface is less than 7 feet

Mildly related anecdote:

At one job, we had an expensive office built out as our company grew. The CEO and CTO came in from out of town to do the ribbon cutting so to speak and welcome us to our new office. I was there as a manager doing setup before we moved the main workforce into the new office, and the CTO came through the kitchen to talk to me, and smashed his face right into a glass wall. Broke his nose and had to fly home eventually.

The day before the team moved in, I convinced the CEO rather easily to put the company logo decalled on that wall.

When Apple Park first started migrating teams a number of people walked into the glass doors in the hallways. They pretty quickly put up little markers on the glass. It was still a stupid design not built for humans.

People adapt and become less human... There must be a weird sort of anxiety to walk around and be extra cautious that reality can suddenly turn into a glass wall.

I once ran into a glass door in my house a few years back. For months after that, I had anxiety and "flashback" like replays of the event when walking anywhere near that door/area in my house. That one incident affected the functioning of my brain for a really long time, it was quite jarring.

I mowed into a ground nest of hornets at my house a few months ago. Took me over a month to get back in the saddle. I "felt" the stings every time I walked near that patch.

Same happened to my dog in a hotel patio. She wouldn’t trust that the door was open probably due to a past event (older rescue). After a few days she trusted me when I called her through and finally believed the door was open. Then of course she saw a bird went to run through and this time it was fucking shut.

Never voluntarily went through glass doors again. Can’t blame her. Rest in peace Lucy you were a gem of a dog.

(Dog people have that one dog they seem to click with and she was mine. I’ve been the guardian of many dogs. She was a gross old pug filled with cancer and heart worms and love.)

I had a similar problem with my dog, when I was a kid.

From that day forward, whenever I opened the door to let her in or out, I had to prove to her that the door was really open, usually by putting my arm through the space, or whatever.

She was the best dog, ever. Despite her -- not irrational -- fear of glass and screen doors.

Yeah exactly! It as so annoying because I fully respected her decision too, I’d be skeptical in her shoes!

We don’t deserve dogs but I’m glad we’ve got ‘em!

Did Apple use low-iron glass, as they do at the retail outlets? That eliminates the greenish tint in thick glass and is harder to see.

The glass was very transparent/untinted so I'd guess they did. Inside the atriums between sections don't have any tint from the glass or at least it's not noticeable.

When my group first moved in the glass was ridiculously hard to see between the sections. It was made more confusing because the doorways had four panes of glass but only the center two panes were doors. It was easy early on to think the outermost lanes were also doors. IIRC (it's been a few years) one of the walkway runs didn't require badge access in the first few days so people could walk full speed into the doors without diverting to the badge reader on the wall.

I'm sure all of Apple Park looked amazing in AutoCAD fly-thrus or whatever but the experience in the building was kind of shitty. Some aspects were improvements over the building over off Infinite Loop but then a lot of aspects were hilariously form over function.

I'm guessing temperature control would be rough there most of the year, when it's sunny? Also what were the other issues you had with the building?

In terms of temperature it could get uncomfortable in the hallways and open seating areas if it was really hot outside. The shared office spaces could get stuffy and a bit oppressive if you had a lot of people or equipment in them. A couple Mac Pros running CI jobs could make a room very uncomfortable. Depending on where you were in the building you might get blinding sunlight in the afternoon.

One of the bigger problems with the building was the size, no pun intended. Despite its size space was always at a premium. Instead of nice private offices most people work in shitty bull pen "offices". Even normal offices have giant glass walls so you feel like you're in a menagerie and they're shared to boot. Of course management got single offices. If the stupid design didn't waste so much space trying to get "natural" light (supplemented by shitty low-flow electric lighting) everyone could have had real offices. The site itself is also gigantic meaning everything was a long walk away.

Getting a nice walk in is great but if you parked in the south parking structure it was a ten-ish minute walk to your car. Then another couple minutes to get to the street. It made running an errand in the middle of the day of eating off-site untenable. When it hot, smokey, or raining the walks to the parking structure really sucked.

I sort of suspected to be something along those lines but, wow… that is unfortunate.

Wow this is real, I remember decades ago when my brother was young he ran into a glass door similarly. This is usually why new window decals take so long to be removed on construction sites - or taped with an X

I highly encourage anyone who had birds crash on their windows to install white dot stickers. I installed some last spring on my windows and not a single bird crashed on them since.

At first they look a bit odd, but after a week they were almost invisible, turns out the brain is really good at hiding things we don't care to see. They are a bit of a pain to install but it is well worth the effort.

This also works for humans, who have a tendency to walk through glass sliding doors if no pattern is applied.

https://www.purlfrost.com/blog/stop-people-walking-glass-pat...

Ha ha, and when Apple had to add these to the new "mothership" campus in Cupertino they were referred to as "Jony's Tears".

Ha! That’s awesome.

Ive’s hubris at the end knew no bounds.

Worth mentioning there are pricier but even more invisible, similar idea solutions. I've got stickers I put on my house and have suggested to clients that are translucent in the visible spectrum but strongly reflect UV. Lots of birds (and in particular songbirds, these are on rural residential buildings with no more than 3 stories so raptors aren't going into them) have receptors for ultraviolet, so to them the stickers look opaque glowing white. They're effective and may be more aesthetic, though again more expensive (they need to be replaced every 6-9 months, the chemical that reflects UV breaks down). Another approach I've used is a sticker that simulates a golden spider web. While not translucent, the thin web look is very subtle, but apparently a lot of birds have evolved to be very hard wired to avoid flying through heavy spider webs so it triggers an avoidance response well.

Finally, there are bug screens that have gotten very subtle too (high density thin weave with low visibility materials used in their construction). As well as reducing external reflection, those will just plain act as a softer shock absorber if a bird runs into one. And of course keep out insects, so doing their job anyway.

I'll add that I still do have (far fewer) bird hits once in awhile, but the big change seems to be outcome. Before a lot of birds died. Afterwards what seems to happen is the hits still see it at the last moment, and the hits have 99% turned into bellyflops. Not fun for the bird no doubt, but it also isn't lethal, they just fly away. Bird death in my experience is generally caused by broken necks, they fly in head first and their neck snaps and that's it. So even if they swerve as the very last moment, it's still a huge boost in survivability. On a big building it might help to have some nets out of sight below windows though so that birds which are temporarily stunned don't fall all the way to the ground.

The UV stickers sound interesting, but is there a (human-)visual indication that they've stopped working? If not, there'll be a whole lot of useless dots on windows, making owners feel better but not actually helping anything.

Presumably you get the auditory indication of birds resuming their collisions with your window.

Unless you have a UV camera then no, there is no indication to humans [0]. Though as sibling said, if nothing else you'd have the obvious direct grim evidence if they had failed. But at the same time I've not found it a concern in practice, there's plenty of stuff in a household that simply needs to be replaced/renewed on an annual or semi-annual basis with no particular indicator before failure. Just part of building maintenance. I set an annual calendar notification and roll it into spring/fall cleanup lists along with things like gutter cleaning. They don't just fail at wildly varying rates, it's a straight forward curve of breakdown so when it says "replace these every 6 months" one can just do that.

----

0: FWIW you can get basic simple monochrome UV-USB 1080p cameras (350-380nm range or so, to get down to 300nm requires much more expensive lenses) to play with for <$250 new, similar to basic low res FLIRs. They can be interesting looks at the world, you can see everything from sunscreen applications to UV patterns on some flowers.

A few years ago, my wife was taking photos of spectral lines of a mercury lamp with our normal camera and she noticed an additional line in the photo. It was an UV line that was visible by the camera but not by the eye.

[IIRC a Cannon camera, not very expensive or fancy. It was very good taking photos of dark rooms during birthdays.]

Edit: Fixed typo IV -> UV

> It was an IV line that was visible by the camera but not by the eye.

If you can't see infraviolet, consider taking a colorblind test.

> infraviolet

…Blue?

Indigo, the made-up color that only exists to make the acronym slightly pronounceable.

Thanks. I fixed the typo.

Since we're all being pedantic: infrared is also infraviolet

TIL I'm capable to perceive light in the ultrared infraviolet spectrum.

I don’t like stickers on my windows, ruins the aesthetic. Instead we should have some kind of spray that transmits a wavelength of light only birds could see but is invisible to humans.

UV reflective stickers

Not invisible.

You can buy a UV pen and draw patterns on the windows. You won’t see them but birds will.

Also for deer. Deer are idiots, the males even more so during the rut. They will see similarly-sized deer in any vertical glass surface (their own reflection) and charge the window antlers-first. They break through the glass and now you have a deer running around inside your house or school. A few stickers won't stop them from seeing their reflection, but it will put an "object" between them and thereby stop the charge. I've even seen this in car windows. Tall deer (elk) are so dumb that they will repeatedly charge the tiny elk reflected in a car window. They aren't attacking the car but the other elk they think is inside. I'm surprised they all don't drown every time they see rival elk inside a calm lake.

> I'm surprised they all don't drown every time they see rival elk inside a calm lake.

They probably figure the rival elk is already drowning, so why bother.

Whereas a rival elk inside a car or house is just plain aggravating. Who does he think he is? A human?

I had a robin nest in my backyard close to my French doors. Every day one of them would pass by the doors, see their reflection and then attack it. Apparently they like to keep out competitors when they're nesting. They would at it for hours until I obscured the lower half with some potted plants.

> the brain is really good at hiding things we don't care to see

This is why my desk looks like a mess to other people ;)

We find that, while this deters birds, it seems to attract bees. They fly and land on many individual dots before eventually flying away.

Has anyone else experienced this?

I have not noticed anything like this.

They think they're flowers? UV light equivalent?

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-11971274 "Database shows how bees see world in UV"

My partner has a very white bicycle helmet and bugs are often flying into it for the same reason I think. Mines darker and it almost never happens other than the occasional and expected collision.

We have success with post-it notes. Very cheap, and provides respite from birds breaking their necks outside our windows.

I get a lot of birds in my yard and decorated the windows with translucent UV stickers. Now every sunset I get to see a stained glass dragon on my wood floors. Highly recommend.

Do you have a link to the sticker? I'm interested!

https://www.amazon.com/Dragon-Collision-Strikes-Stickers-Win...

Toronto has had bird-friendly design guidelines since 2007. Surprised Chicago still hasn’t implemented a solution. https://www.toronto.ca/city-government/planning-development/...

Chicago does have an ordinance requiring bird-friendly designs in new construction or renovations, but it was passed in 2022 and the convention center hasn't had window work done since then.

Both Chicago and Illinois have bird friendly building ordinances but the building in question was built in 1960 long before they existed. It’s also massive so mitigations will take a long time to be applied.

> It’s also massive so mitigations will take a long time to be applied.

Surely it cannot be too hard to slap 2 or 3 anti-collision decals on every window from the outside?

There are stickers on the building. It is a nearly 600000 square foot building and the exterior is all windows.

1000 birds don’t hit it _every day_ this was an exceptional even caused by specific conditions.

The facility is actively trying new lighting solutions to mitigate bird strikes as that’s the main issue.

A crew of window cleaners could hit it in under a week

It has stickers

Right... swing down and apply stickers. Yes I read the article.

To give a sense of the scale of this building: Part of the convention center empty: https://www.google.com/maps/@41.8535338,-87.6124521,3a,75y,6...

From what used to be Meigs Field. You have to back up quite a bit to see the entire building. It's very large, and right on the lake. https://www.google.com/maps/@41.8538295,-87.6090441,3a,75y,2...

You need more than 2 or 3 decals per window — there should be 2" or less of vertical space and 4" or less of horizontal space between markings (the 2" x 4" rule).

Wow only a few cities have replicated this. Is the associated cost of designing bird friendly buildings cost prohibitive? If so, need regulation to enforce this at state/local levels.

it's not cost prohibitive if you pay for it. but it's more expensive by a lot

This is SUCH an awesome and wonderful document. Thanks for sharing!

We'd had a very warm fall until Wednesday of this week. Temperature dropped 30 degrees. Birds had been enjoying the warm weather and then the sudden change had them all migrating at once. They ran into a rainstorm which made migration very difficult (this is called fallout). So now you've got tons of birds struggling to migrate and aiui flying at lower altitude because of the rain

McCormick (the building in question) is a very large building immediately off the lake with lots of glass windows. There may be some additional mitigations to be made but it's a bad confluence of events. It doesn't happen even once a decade.

This is an important migration corridor, there's even a nice bird sanctuary within site of McCormick. If you're ever there for a convention the area surrounding the convention center is very nice. Northerly Island is becoming one of the nicest parks in Chicago, and is a wonderful walk from the convention center.

How can you write such an article and not put a photo of the building there? Yes, I can search one but WTF.

Right!?

I came here to ask the same question and Cmd-F-ed to this comment.

I had to google it to see the photos of the building.

...and - with apologies to all HN cat owners - I feel we might want to put building lethality into context by recalling that:

"free-ranging domestic cats kill 1.3–4.0 billion birds and 6.3–22.3 billion mammals [in the USA] annually"

https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms2380

I side with the cats :)

https://www.snopes.com/news/2021/08/06/dont-blame-cats-for-d...

I had this happen at my place a number of times, my house is up on a hill with large windows facing the view. I didn't want to put stickers or other things that would detract from the view. A neighbor mentioned that they put up a couple of decorative hanging plants off to the side of the windows, didn't have to be right in front which would block the view. I opted for a couple of hanging outdoor art pieces (I have a brown thumb). It worked, my theory is it gives the birds something to gauge perspective on perhaps. I am not sure how that could work for skyscrapers, but for a home like mine it worked like a charm.

Were there any incidents before your measures? I may face a similar problem and it concerns me because I really don't want to harm anyone, including birds and insects.

In one migration day, not every day, as I initially thought what the title suggested.

Yeah, you start to run the numbers (multiply by 365 days in a year, times the number of buildings in Chicago, times the number of cities...) and you see a mass extinction before next Spring.

Similarly, but then I realized I had never heard anyone warn me, "Stay off of Canal street. By 1pm the stench of the hundreds of bird carcasses really starts to hit you. Dead bird retrieval does not happen till 7pm."

On a related bird/window note:

Where I live there are many birds - we have been encouraging them for years after nearly exterminating them carelessly.

Two in particular, an indigenous bird we call the Fantail, or Pīwakawaka, and the common Starling.

The starlings occasionally blunder inside the house, and they cannot get out, they will repeatedly smash into the same window, over and over, until they brain themselves and loose consciousness or we take mercy and catch them and evict them.

The Pīwakawaka on the other hand will come in an open window, fly into every corner of the house looking for, catching, and eating flies, then fly out the window they came in.

One day I carelessly shut the windows with a Pīwakawaka in the house. I was sitting at my computer and the Pīwakawaka flew at my head, repeatedly, until I got up and opened a window for it to escape.

Birds can be remarkably stupid ("bird brained" for a reason) or they can be simply remarkable.

Guessing NZ?!

Yes birds when they are smart can be very, very smart.

I am pals with a couple of blue jays who eat my sunflowers. They chase off the crows who torment my dog.

The crows will swoop at Kramer the poodley mutt and it drives him crazy. His genetics make him a small game hunter and excellent ratter. He looks like a lap dog and can be one but give him prey around and he’s a monster.

He caught a crow dive bombing him once which just got him desperate to do it again.

The pugs just ignore them thus the crows don’t bother diving at them but they learned from the one failed attempt.

They also had what seemed to be a funeral for their fallen soldier.

I plant fifty or so sunflowers every year to fatten up the blue jays for winter and help protect their nest from the hawks that linger too.

Quite the little deal we have.

There’s a distinct call they’ll make when they want help with a murder of crows or a pair of hawks. The hawk scream is higher pitched that’s a defcon one.

I work from my garden mostly so respond quickly with the high pressure hose that can reach to the top of the tree they nest in to chase off our enemies if my jay homies are outnumbered a lot.

Two websites that detail methods to prevent window strikes at home:

https://abcbirds.org/solutions/prevent-home-collisions/

Scroll down to Popular Blog Posts https://flap.org/

Regulation is the answer here since the mitigation methods are known

Regulations have existed in Chicago for over 50 years. The building predates it, and has been adding mitigations such as changing lighting and applying stickers for some time now.

This is not a common occurrence for the building in question.

Not just birds, but with everything else in life, I tend to first check if regulations exist before advocating for (more) regulation.

It’s not a binary question. Effective regulation (including timely updates such as mandating seat belts or airbags once they become possible) very much is a living ongoing project.

Gloomy weather? Lamps on in the office? This creates a bird death trap.

Bug in the latest firmware. Should be patched during the next recharge or OTA for the newer models.

https://www.guardianglass.com/us/en/our-glass/guardian-bird1...

For buildings that don't have permanent bird strike mitigation measures built in, I wonder if temporary whitewash applied by window cleaners would help.

It seems to me that that would be an effective temporary solution, but would have to be re-applied following rain. The bigger problem would be cost. The building in the article is McCormick place which was hit pretty hard during Covid and is likely still recovering (financially.) But no business is likely to spend the $$$ to mitigate the issue unless they are forced.

The bigger problem is that this is not the only building in Chicago that is hazardous to birds. Fix this one and there will be another noteworthy for the "most bird strikes" in Chicago.

I didn't realize it was McCormick place when I posted. That building is probably particularly bad because it's right on the shore of Lake Michigan (a bird migration superhighway). Ironically/tragically, the situation might have been made worse in recent years by the reestablishment of native plants in the immediately surround area. I'm certainly no expert, but I wondered if temporary whitewash might be more amenable to the building owner than something more permanent. It is a massive building complex, but might even only be necessary to do the north facing side. The roof overhang might allow it to stick around for a few peak-migration weeks.

Reminds me of the mass insects dying from car windshields, but that is a much tougher issue to tackle than a stationary building

If it's culling the infestation of dammed "Rock Dove" aka "city pigeons"... how do I get one in my city?

Do they have a maintenance crew that goes out and cleans up all the dead birds? =(

I keep the venitian blinds down but open for our problem window.

The numbers here are staggering....

I looked out the window yesterday for a few minutes. I think I heard a chirp faraway among the natural traffic stream.

The silent spring is coming.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Spring?wprov=sfti1

Reply on news.ycombinator.com