Up to 1,500 birds flew into Philly buildings one day last week
Bill proposes requiring anti-collision methods
PHILADELPHIA — Stephen Maciejewski dropped to a knee on a Philadelphia sidewalk Wednesday morning and gently scooped up a yellow-billed cuckoo that had smashed into a skyscraper and died on its way to Central America or the West Indies.
“This probably happened yesterday,” said Maciejewski, a 71year-old retired social worker and volunteer for Audubon Pennsylvania. He labelled a plastic bag with the time, date and location, tucked the slim migrator into it, and continued his rounds.
Maciejewski gets emotional when he speaks about all the birds he finds, but nothing, he says, prepared him for what happened on Friday.
“So many birds were falling out of the sky we didn’t know what was going on,” he said, choking up. “It was a really catastrophic event. The last time something like this happened was in 1948.”
On Friday, an estimated 1,000 to 1,500 birds flew into buildings in Center City overnight and into early morning during what he Maciejewski called a “perfect storm” of avian calamity. He collected 400 birds during between 5 and 8 a.m. in the three-square-block radius he regularly covers —an astonishing number, according to a Pennsylvania Audubon official.
“There were so many, I was picking up five at a time,” Maciejewski said. “One guy from building maintenance dumped 75 living and dead birds in front of me as if it were a collection.”
Maciejewski logs each bird, noting its flight path, time and location of impact.
“There were so many birds I ran out of supplies.”
He can collect only so many birds because building maintenance crews and Center City District workers sweep detritus, including bird bodies, early each morning before commuters arrive. Maciejewski has established a rapport with some workers who save birds for him.
“We collected almost 100 birds on one small roof,” he said of Friday’s tally. In the five days since, things returned to normal, and Maciejewski collected no more than 20 birds a morning.
Why so many birds in one day? Maciejewski and Pennsylvania Audubon can only guess.
“This is complicated stuff,” Maciejewski said.
It appears weather events lined up for the worse during what was likely the peak of migratory birds’ flight from Canada, Maine, upstate New York and elsewhere toward Central and South America. A sudden plunge in temperatures could have prompted the birds to start their flights en masse.
In Philadelphia, Friday brought low cloud cover, light rain, and a full moon, all of which could have had an influence. Those conditions could have pushed the birds lower. Birds flying from remote Northern habitats might have little experience with glass. On any morning, street trees reflect in the glass, making it appear they are inside buildings.
Inquirer columnist Inga Saffron has written about the impact of glass buildings on birds in the past. The U.S. House of Representatives in July introduced the Bird-safe Buildings Act of 2019. If approved, it would require buildings to use methods designed to eliminate bird collisions.
“We have to bring people together to make the glass friendlier to birds,” Maciejewski said. “We’re contributing to the extinction of American songbirds.”