1,500 Birds Die After Flying Into Philadelphia Skyscrapers: What Led To The Tragedy
Over 1,500 birds were found dead in the streets after they flew into Philadelphia skyscrapers on Saturday.? ?
The National Audubon Society (Audubon) is an American non-profit environmental organization dedicated to conservation of birds and their habitat.?One volunteer of the Pennsylvania Audubon Society, Stephen Machevsky collected the small, frail bodies of birds that had crashed into glass windows and fallen dead to the sidewalk. Usually only a dozen a day, but it was different on Sunday.
"Birds were everywhere, and all dead"
"I've never seen anything like this," Maciejewski told CNN on Thursday. "There were birds everywhere, and they were all dead."??
Maciejewski had begun collecting the fallen birds at 5:30 a.m. Two hours later, he realized he needed backup. He called Keith Russell, the program manager for urban conservation for Audubon Pennsylvania.??
But, what led to the mass deaths?
Audubon Pennsylvania suspects that the mass deaths of hundreds of birds that collided into several buildings in Center City, Philadelphia, started the previous night (intervening Saturday-Sunday night). Peak migration season, which typically begins in the fall, combined with poor weather conditions, may have led to the incident, it said.??
"WeĄ¯re trying to figure that out.? The things we canĄ¯t say? It was a full moon. It was the peak of the center of the bird migration.? We had a storm going on. It was raining, the clouds were low, and all of that contributed to it," Machevsky added, "As many as a billion birds are estimated killed each year in window strikes, but itĄ¯s not just skyscrapers. ItĄ¯s your house windows, too."
Keith Russell of Audubon Pennsylvania said that the mass casualty happened October 2. He says it was a perfect storm of weather conditions that first led the birds into danger. They were attracted to the lights in the skyscrapers but unaware the glass would stop their path.?"We expected to have a large migration but we did not expect birds to crash into buildings in the numbers that they did," said Russell. He further?said that birds collide with buildings on a daily basis and especially during migration season, but not on this scale.??
"Philadelphia is along the Atlantic Flyway, so the birds are migrating through the city in gigantic numbers," Russell told CNN.
Some of the species found that day include warblers, thrushes, vireos and sparrows.
Tragedies from the past
Russell said the last time something on this scale happened was in 1948 when flock of birds slammed into the PSFS building.
"We would like to not see this ever again, but it does happen from time to time and it's hard to predict. The conditions just happened to be right and the birds just happened to be there and everything lined up for something like this to happen," said Russell.
Other recorded events?similar to last week's have occurred in 1905 and 1915. Last fall, there were similar mass killings at a NASCAR building?in Charlotte, North Carolina, and in Galveston, Texas, in 2017 during a storm.
