How Annette Prince and her “army” of volunteers made Chicago skies safer for their avian friends. by Jason Porterfield
The city and its suburbs appear suddenly on the continent below, the homes and buildings and skyscrapers stark and looming after hundreds of miles of farmland and prairie. The flock that soars above this new and alien landscape has seen similar sights: the buildings and roads of Dallas, Little Rock and St. Louis. But nothing has been this vast.
Wing-to-wing, they draft on their leaders. The tired and weak move back to let the stronger fliers break the wind resistance. The wind acts in peculiar ways. Gusts off of Lake Michigan turn into updrafts and eddies as they encounter downtown walls and cornices, at times turning their airways into roaring, swirling currents.
Still, it is a good place to land in the spring. There are parks to rest in and fresh pools of water to drink. The older flock members guide the younger ones to the lakeshore and the wooded riverbanks. There they alight, roosting in the trees lining the city’s boulevards, casually befouling the salt-caked cars parked beneath. They visit backyard feeders stocked with seed for the spring migration season. They sing their songs deep into the night.
But, there is trouble here, too. Alley cats watch some of those feeders. Poisons mingle with edible refuse in city alleyways. Predatory birds—from owls and crows to peregrine falcons—swoop on smaller species. The weather shifts unpredictably well into April and May.
And high above the city sidewalks, one yellow-bellied sapsucker—a type of migratory woodpecker—encounters the most dangerous element of all.
Riding the city breezes, it winds its way towards an apparent patch of greenery, a planter situated beside a second-story window in a building near the intersection of Washington and Dearborn. It doesn’t realize that guarding the seeming resting spot is a plate of clear window glass, as hard and unforgiving as any alley cat. The sapsucker swoops, diving toward the inviting spot. It sails down, in full glide, almost there until it raps the glass and falls to the sidewalk.
Kevin Carroll works in an office near the crash site, near the downtown Hyatt Regency Hotel. He is also part of the Chicago Bird Collision Monitors, a sprawling, citywide network of office workers, birdwatchers, commuters, and animal lovers who take the time to rescue injured birds.
Just after dawn, Carroll stands on the street corner, holding a rustling paper bag out to Annette Prince, the group’s director. Tall and long-armed, he shivers slightly in the early morning breeze. The bag rustles. The paper bags, lined with tissue paper, are standard equipment for the bird monitors. This one is for the sapsucker.
“It might have a hurt wing,” Carroll says.
“I can’t tell about the wing,” answers Prince. “It might just have a concussion. The beak and eyes look all right, though. We’ll put a label on the bag before we send it to Willowbrook.” Willowbrook Wildlife Center, where her group takes many of the injured birds that they find. Carroll thanks her for stopping by for the bird before running back to his office building, late for a meeting.
Spring migration begins in mid-March and can last through May. During migration seasons, the Bird Collision Monitors start their days just before sunrise. Members arrive in the Loop before 6:00 a.m. to catch the previous night’s casualties. Four or five will work the Loop until mid-morning, when Prince figures most of the migrating birds would have settled into a safe place for the day. Today, Prince is “morning captain” of the West Loop Team. Her friend and another longtime member, Suzanne Turner, heads the East Loop Team.
At Washington and Dearborn, Prince takes the bagged bird in hand. A small woman with long brown hair and bright green eyes behind thick glasses, she snaps on a pair of latex gloves and opens the bag. Cupping her hands, she lifts the sapsucker clear of the opening and peers at it. Redheaded with speckled feathers on its back and a yellow-white breast, the bird sits quietly for Prince’s examination.
Birds fly around solid objects all the time. Trees look like trees, rocky cliffs resemble nothing more than rocky cliffs, and a windowless barn wall looks like something in between. But Chicago moved beyond barns long ago.
The steel and concrete skyscrapers of the Loop dwarf neighborhood two-flats and tower over the South Side’s shuttered factories. Their glass facades gleam throughout the day, and glow by night. Looking out over Lake Michigan, a person can see the city lights from Indiana, and even distinguish individual buildings by their illuminated outlines. The Hancock Building. The Sears Tower. The city’s wealth on display like a crystal chandelier.
To the migrating flocks of birds – estimated at 8 million in number – that pass through the city every spring and fall, they mean temptation, confusion, and death.
No instinct tells them how to deal with towering skyscrapers and their befuddling windows. Birds do not recognize window glass as a barrier. Drawn by reflective glass and the illusion of open space beyond, they crash into buildings. Or illuminated windows attract them during the night or early morning. The result is the same. They strike the glass and drop to the sidewalk, stunned, injured, or dead.
Prince knows some veterinary science, learned through a lifetime of working with wildlife. She could easily earn the license needed to administer anti-concussion shots to the birds she rescues, or get the permit that would let her take birds into her possession overnight. Prince prefers to leave the medical science aspect of animal rescue to others. For her, the weight of saving birds from the city’s sidewalks is enough.
Prince coordinates the movements of an ever-widening group of volunteers. She estimates their number to be around 80. She calls them her “army.”
People answer the group’s hotline, serve as drivers, hand out fliers, keep statistics, and walk the streets looking for stricken birds. This is the immediate circle. Among her group’s people, Prince also counts the doormen, sidewalk sweepers, custodians, newspaper vendors, and anonymous pedestrians who use the hotline when they find injured birds.
Robbie Hunsinger founded the Chicago Bird Collision Monitors in 2003, after observing birds crashing into windows and getting killed or injured. Tall and unassuming, Hunsinger is in many ways the opposite of Prince, who virtually pulses with energy. A Georgia native who studied classical oboe at the Cleveland Conservatory and occasionally played as a substitute with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, she ran CBCM from its inception until 2005. Though she remains committed to the group and occasionally works as a rescuer, Hunsinger felt the group’s growth demanded too much of her time. Prince is her hand-chosen successor.
Chicago Bird Collision Monitors came about though Hunsinger’s response to one deadly autumn morning. Her friend Ken Wysocki spent hours birdwatching in the South Loop. He began noticing increasing numbers of dead birds on the sidewalk. Wysocki correlated the increased death toll with the migratory calendar and found that the number of deaths increased as the peak migratory season approached.
Wysocki concentrated his birdwatching hours to early mornings and late evenings, discovering to his horror that birds were crashing into lit windows, battering themselves to death. Wysocki recruited Hunsinger, whom he knew from the Chicago Audobon Society, to help him collect data. They went out every morning to observe the collisions. They compiled statistics on the number of deaths, the species involved, and the location. On September 10, 2002, they found more than 80 dead birds within the single square mile that makes up the Chicago Loop.
Hunsinger took action that afternoon. She began calling building managers, asking them to turn their lights off at night. Most of the ones she reached listened, agreeing to keep their buildings dark. When Hunsinger and Wysocki made their usual circuit the next morning, they failed to find a single dead bird.
For the next few months, Hunsinger made the morning trip around downtown a vigil. She kept detailed notes on the dead birds she found, statistics that Annette Prince continues to keep. As she worked, she began talking to people she encountered. No one wanted to see a dead or hurt bird on the sidewalk, it seemed. Many people expressed support for her cause. Other bird watchers started going out with Hunsinger in the mornings. When Hunsinger first started rescuing birds, the only rehabilitation center she knew of was Fellow Mortals Rehabilitation, hours away in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. She began making contacts with more local rehabilitation centers soon after she found herself driving to Wisconsin several times a week.
In Spring 2003, Hunsinger formally founded Chicago Bird Collision Monitors. The group is an all-volunteer organization. No one draws a paycheck, there are no dues, and people are free to commit as much or as little time as they like. Some may volunteer for a couple hours every day. Others spend only one morning a month monitoring.
Before Hunsinger formed the group, the sapsucker likely would have been doomed. Predators, such as cats, rats, raccoons, and other birds pose the greatest threat to injured birds. Birds died from injuries or from shock. Cold or rain killed them, or they were inadvertently crushed by cars, bicycles, or careless pedestrians.
Ornithologists say that collisions are the second most deadly hazard facing migrating birds, behind only predation. The numbers are difficult to pin down, however, and could range anywhere from 97 million to 900 million birds killed annually from colliding with windows in the U.S. alone.
The numbers come through Prince’s science advisor Dr. Daniel Klem, Jr., a biology professor at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Klem is an expert on bird collisions. He devised the means of calculating the statistics, taking observations from bird watching groups dating back to the 1970s and basing his calculations on population numbers. Klem started working with the Chicago Bird Collision Monitors in 2004.
Annette Prince had been volunteering at the Flint Creek Rehabilitation Center when she found out about Chicago Bird Collision Monitors through one of Hunsinger’s outreach programs. She joined the group following a 2004 presentation Hunsinger gave for the Chicago Audobon Society.
Prince, a Cleveland native, grew up watching her backyard feeder in a city that she calls “notoriously inhospitable” to wildlife. She escaped Cleveland’s struggling economy thirty years ago, moving to Chicago right out of high school and falling into volunteer work with the Brookfield Zoo. Work in the zoo’s birdhouse awakened her passion for birding and led to her involvement with the Audobon Society.
With the Chicago Bird Collision Monitors, Prince found an outlet for her energy and organizational skills. She walked the Loop, drove birds to rehabilitation centers, answered the group’s phone, and helped Hunsinger with her lectures. In 2005, Hunsinger asked her to take over as the group’s director.
Carrying the bagged sapsucker in one hand and her net—about the size of a whisk broom—in the other, Prince sets of for Federal Plaza, meeting up with Janet Pellegrini under Alexander Calder’s massive reddish-orange “Flamingo” sculpture. A woman who has spent the last 15 years working for the EPA, Pelligrini devotes her early mornings to scouting for injured birds.
Pelligrini has not picked up any birds this morning, though she has “chased a few doorstoppers.” The Bird Collision Monitors develop an eye for anything small and even vaguely bird-shaped. They willingly confess to chasing down candy wrappers in their search for birds.
“Yesterday, though, we had a sapsucker inside the Dirksen building. It must have gotten in through the revolving doors. I went in and then had to track it down. The speckled floor really almost matches their back feathers, but I found it and netted it,” Pelligrini says, proudly brandishing her net. Prince shows her the sapsucker, captured barehanded by Carroll.
“We don’t really advise that people catch them that way. The volunteers use whatever level of protection they’re most comfortable with. I always wear latex gloves and wash my hands afterwards. If it’s a raptor, I put these on,” Prince says, holding up a pair of gray leather gardening gloves.
Working at Hunsinger’s side, Prince was part of the group when Chicago became the first city in the U.S. to go dark for the 2003 spring migration. The darkening of the city took about six months, as Hunsinger maneuvered the miniature bureaucracies that govern every high rise. Custodians, doormen, and clerks willingly flipped switches, but she sometimes had trouble finding someone with the authority to order all of a building’s lights off.
Hunsinger’s long-awaited triumph came in late 2002, when she finally contacted Jim Baroni, manager of the Blue Cross Blue Shield Tower at Randolph and Columbus. Baroni agreed to turn out the lights in his building’s soaring atrium, the last of the danger spots Hunsinger had designated for darkness.
When the 2003 spring migration came, the group had convinced building managers throughout the Loop to participate in a blackout. Buildings 40 stories or higher turned off their external display lights—except those intended to warn low-flying aircraft—and dimmed interior lights. Some closed shades to avoid attracting migrating birds to the glass.
According to Prince, hundreds of birds used to die this way. Today, the Loop stays dark for the spring and fall migrations. Any manager who forgets to put out the lights receives a call from Prince, whose monitors keep an eye on the skyline.
Prince delights in marshalling her volunteers to action and likens herself to a general, constantly maneuvering against an enemy that threatens to engulf her and her allies. She knows their schedules, as well as their specific strengths.
Jim Tibensky’s schedule doesn’t permit much volunteering. Much of his time is taken up by his work as an attorney or kayaking. Prince refers to him as CBCM’s “aquatic unit” due to his skill at maneuvering a boat. Prince also cites her “bicycle cavalry” and “alpine unit” as instrumental in some of the group’s unusual rescues.
“We have volunteers go out all the time on bikes. They have to have racks and baskets, though, because you can’t hold more than a couple bagged birds and steer at the same time,” she says.
The “alpine unit” consists of any members willing to climb out of windows and onto upper-story atriums. The atriums—windowed, recessed spaces set into the upper floors of high-rise buildings that are designed to let natural sunlight into inner corridors—don’t pose a direct obstructive danger to the birds. They don’t crash into them. Instead, they may see plants set out on the balcony-like atrium floors and fly down. They aren’t harmed, but the atrium shafts don’t give them enough room to take off and fly away.
Prince herself is the group’s principal driver. She spends most mornings behind the wheel of her van, circling a block while her monitors check it for birds. When one of her monitors catches a bird, she drives around to pick it up. She keeps an eye out for injured birds even when driving, explaining this “cab driver mentality” as she executes a flawless three-point turn in the middle of LaSalle Street.
At the end of a morning, the back cargo hold of her green Plymouth minivan is stuffed full of birds in bags and boxes. Coconut air fresheners mask any bird smells. Today, she meets volunteer Suzanne Turner near the intersection of Michigan Avenue and Wacker Drive. Turner served as captain of the morning’s East Side Team.
Turner has had a busy morning, the trunk of her BMW sedan seemingly packed with brown bags. Many of them contain dead birds. The group saves the dead birds it finds and donates them to the Field Museum of Natural History, which uses them to research migratory patterns and behaviors.
One of Turner’s dead birds is a woodcock. Mottled brown and roughly crow-sized, the woodcocks move north along the area’s rivers. This one hit a building not far from Wacker Drive. The Bird Monitors, not wanting to antagonize building owners by giving away information that could bring bad publicity, are reluctant to name the site.
“They’re usually the first to arrive in the spring and the last to leave in the fall. This one was a little late. She was beautiful,” Prince says, examining the dead woodcock. She and Turner confer. Prince agrees to take Turner’s live birds, driving them to Willowbrook Wildlife Refuge in suburban Barrington. Turner will take the dead birds to the Field Museum.
Prince keeps the Bird Collision Monitors closely tied to other area groups interested in the more than 300 species that make up Chicago’s diverse bird population. She helped bring the CBCM into the Bird Conservation Network, a collective organization consisting of rehabilitation centers, conservation groups, bird watchers, and nature enthusiasts.
“When the group just started and it was only four or five people patrolling the whole Loop, they would sometimes just take the birds to Grant Park and let them go,” Prince says. “Now it feels like the whole city’s starting to wake up to these lives all around us.”
Today’s numbers aren’t huge, eleven live birds saved by Prince, another twelve by Turner. Many will go to Willowbrook until they recover from their concussions and traumas. Some will be released within hours. The more seriously injured may have to stay for weeks.
The sapsucker is one of the lucky ones. Noisily flapping in the bag throughout the morning, it’s clearly anxious to get out. Late in the afternoon, Prince calls Willowbrook. A volunteer has already taken the bird to the forest preserve. At the edge of the woods, she releases the catch on the cage the bird now occupies and swings the tiny door open. Her gloved hands reach in, cradling the sapsucker as she lifts it from the enclosure. She sets it on the ground, steps back a pace. It looks back at her for a moment, its tiny head swiveling as it hops forward. Another hop, and it takes to the sky.
