Feral Cities (25 page)

I tell her about the headless bird. “Do you have a bag?” she asks.

“Er, no.”

“Well, could you put it in your pocket then?”

“It's covered in ants,” I protest. “Lots and lots of ants. I'm not going to put it in my pocket.” In fairness, even if the ants weren't busy devouring it, I doubt I would have been up for having a decapitated bird in my pocket. The ants merely seal the deal.

Annette sounds a little frustrated at my unwillingness to collect the carcass, but it's not as if it's going anywhere. Unless those ants eat really fast.

Ten minutes later, Annette arrives. She's wearing a khaki photographer's vest over a bright green Chicago Bird Collision Monitors T-shirt and a tan baseball cap. In one hand she's holding a bird net and, in the other, a Whole Foods Better Bag filled with white paper bags, an assortment of binder clips, and some marker pens.

She checks out the body. “It's a yellow-bellied sapsucker,” she says. It sounds like an insult but is actually a type of migratory woodpecker.

“This is most likely a peregrine kill—one of the peregrine falcons that live in the city. I don't think I want to take him because I'm not sure I want all these ants. I can see why you weren't going to take him with you. Good call.”

She moves the body and head to a nearby flower bed that will now be the unfortunate bird's final resting place, and we set off to find more victims of the city.

We soon find another. I say we, but I mistook it for a leaf and carried on walking, until Annette called me back. It's a black-throated green warbler, a small bird with a yellow face and an olive smear that starts at the top of its head and runs down its back.

It's alive but dazed. It stands motionless at the bottom of the building. If this were a cartoon, there would be stars spinning around its head.

Annette crouches and creeps toward it. The bird is still staring vacantly into space when she brings her net down on it. The warbler barely responds as she scoops it into her gloved hand. Its beak is cracked.

“He has hit his head and broken his beak a little. His eye is swollen shut,” says Annette as she shows me the bird. “Most of these birds have head trauma. See how the beak broke? It's like going through your windshield. His head really hurts right now; he'll have a concussion.”

Annette takes out a paper bag and scrawls the date, time, and location on it in black marker before gently dropping the bird in and closing it with a binding clip.

“They are very unnoticeable because they are little compared to these gigantic buildings. It takes a whole sort of mindset to see them,” she says when I marvel at how she spotted it. Right on cue, she immediately spots two more on the other side of the street.

As the morning progresses, we find more and more dead and injured birds. They are everywhere, crumpled or concussed on the sidewalks. It's nothing short of a massacre. We find an entire field guide's worth of birds. There are winter wrens, black-and-white warblers patterned like humbugs, hermit thrushes, indigo buntings with feathers the color of azure, and more yellow-bellied sapsuckers.

Over the years the collision monitors have found more than 150 bird species on the Chicago streets. They've even found rare species that bird watchers can spend their entire lives trying to see without success. “Someone called to say there's a dead bird on a bridge once and on these bridges there's generally nothing but pigeons, so we assumed it was a pigeon,” Annette says. “It ended up being a very rare bird, the Holy Grail of bird watching—the black rail. It's like a little Easter egg chick. I've gone on so many bird trips looking for them, and 99 percent of bird watchers have never seen these birds because they are black and nocturnal and hide in marshes. The odds of seeing one are incredibly slim, so finding one on a bridge in Chicago was really astounding. But sad.”

We find bats too. A silver-haired bat, which is named after the silver tips of its otherwise black fur, and an eastern red bat the color of ginger. “Not all volunteers pick up bats as bats have a risk of rabies,” says Annette, lifting the red bat off the West Adams Street sidewalk.

Annette's been inoculated against rabies, although she would still need urgent medical treatment if she got bitten or scratched by a bat. The jabs merely buy her extra time to get treated. It's a risk she's willing to take, not least because she likes bats. “People just assume they are out of vampire movies or something like that, but they are gorgeous. Look! There's his little fangs!”

Anyhow, she adds, “the last person in Illinois who got rabies got it from a cow.”

The two bats are both alive, but many of the birds are not so lucky. About half the birds we find are dead. Yet they still get bagged up all the same, because they are valuable for researchers, who have learned lots about bird migration patterns in the Chicago area from the bodies the collision monitors collect.

“There's a bird called the American woodcock. It's a game bird with a long beak,” says Annette. “They thought all the birds moved up north where the males do these elaborate mating dances and the females pick the best and that it was at that point they try to nest.” But the dead woodcocks the collision monitors found upended that theory. “When they looked at the females we get in the spring, many of them were already carrying eggs, so they must be breeding someplace further south and that indicates there are breeding grounds along their migratory path. That's something that would never have been discovered without having the birds in hand to see that the eggs were fertilized.”

We're not the only ones out collecting birds today. Another twelve collision monitors are on patrol this morning. At one point we cross paths with one of them. He looks stressed. “One alive and four dead on the east side. I don't have time to bag them—I'm just literally throwing and running,” he hurriedly tells Annette before hopping on his bicycle and racing off toward the Loop.

Then there are the phone calls. Annette is also handling the monitors' hotline, which Chicagoans can use to report sightings of fallen birds, and the
der-der-nu-nu
ring of her cell phone rarely stops. She's getting an average of one call every two minutes, and rush hour is only just starting.

The public isn't just calling, either. At one point a passerby hands us a McDonald's bag that he has used to pick up an injured Nashville warbler he spotted on his way to work. The janitors of Chicago's skyscrapers are also helping out. As we pass their foyers,
they rush out to give us more bird-filled paper bags or to grab more bags from Annette.

“Most of the buildings are helpful—they are our eyes and ears,” she says. Inevitably there are exceptions. “We've been told that one building's janitor has been putting live birds into the trash compactor. He won't save them for us and won't call us. Pretty horrifying.”

Soon Annette's Whole Foods bag is overflowing with bagged birds, a few of which have overcome their concussion and are now fluttering and chirping in panic. With the bag and our hands full we put the search on hold and head to the monitors' van to offload them.

On the way I ask Annette how the monitors came to be. “It was founded in 2003, back when they were still leaving the lights on in the buildings,” she says. “There were even more birds then. There were times when you could find a hundred birds at one building. One night they left the lights on at one of the more prominent buildings and they found a thousand dead birds there. Today, we will probably find a couple hundred, all told.”

Annette, who is a speech therapist when she's not looking for birds on the streets, joined the group in 2004. “I didn't get into bird watching until later in life. I always thought that bird watching was a silly pastime where you got up far too early in the morning and looked around in the dark for birds. So now what do I do? I get up early in the morning and look in the dark for birds, so it's gone full circle,” she laughs.

“I do it because I feel so bad for these birds that are making amazing migrations, traveling stupendous journeys from their wintering grounds to their summer homes and hitting these obstacles. It feels like a privilege to be able to do something to help these birds because they are so vulnerable. When these birds need help there's no one else to come to their assistance.”

With the bag emptied we resume the search, but the rush hour is now in full flow and with it a new sense of urgency. As the roar of trucks, sirens, and cars fills the air and floods of commuters descend
from the train lines above, the risk of injured birds being trampled or run over is rising fast.

Speed is everything and we're now running through the streets. “About 40 percent of what we find are dead, but about 60 percent are live,” says Annette as we push through the crowds. “A good majority survive and get released if they get off the street before they are stepped on or otherwise attacked.”

She stops suddenly. She's seen something across the street. “Bird! There!” she cries. “Alive, maybe?”

Annette shoots into the road, zig-zagging through the traffic. I scramble to keep up, panicked by the four lanes of traffic heading straight for me. But the bird, a dull brown-gray winter wren, is dead. “Everything is dead. Everything is dead.
Awww,”
she says, deflated.

We soon see another bird in the road but, again, we're too late. It's already been crushed by the traffic. I hope it was dead by the time it hit the ground.

There are other dangers lurking in the streets for the birds that survive their collisions. As well as the peregrine falcon that took down this morning's sapsucker, the city's crows and seagulls see the dead and dazed birds as an easy breakfast.

Gulls and crows have even learned to track the collision monitors, using them to help find potential meals. “The crows and gulls are very smart. They will follow you. I've stopped to look for a bird and had a gull pull up and look at what I'm doing. There's a real understanding that we're pursuing what they are pursuing. If I'm fixed on something they turn their attention to it.” They also go after the bats. “The crows and gulls will come and peck at the bats and eat them while they are still alive, and they scream. It's a really awful thing to see.”

Not every predator has wings. There are feral cats, downtown rats, and hungry ants to contend with as well. “At one point we had a raccoon that moved into one of the plaza areas here, and every morning he would eat some of the birds.”

The birds are often defenseless too, wrapped up tight in the spiderwebs they crash into as they fall down the sides of skyscrapers after hitting the windows. “We get an amazing number of birds all tangled in spider webbing,” says Annette as she tries to pull strands of sticky web off of a black-and-white warbler. “Sometimes they fall down those buildings and brush all the cobwebs off, and you can't seem to groom them out. They are so wrapped up, the live ones can't get themselves free.”

What is striking about the birds we find is that none of them are birds we expect to see in cities. There's not a single house sparrow, pigeon, starling, gull, or crow among them.

They are all migratory birds, and there's no shortage of them, because Chicago lies in the path of the Mississippi Flyway. The flyway follows the Mississippi River and is a major route for North America's migratory birds. About a third of the continent's bird species use the Mississippi Flyway, including 40 percent of waterfowl species.

But it does seem odd, nonetheless. Why can a pigeon navigate the city when a winter wren ends up crashing into something as obvious and static as a whopping great skyscraper?

One person trying to figure out the answer to this riddle is Graham Martin, the emeritus professor of avian sensory science at the University of Birmingham in England. Weather, he tells me, is a key factor. “These migrants tend to fly at many thousands of feet when migrating, so normally they are well out of the range of hazards like buildings and they fly over cities and we don't even know they are there. The danger seems to come when the weather changes and suddenly you get cloud cover coming in and the birds come down lower.”

Birds appear to use the stars to guide them during migrations, and so once they are below the clouds, bright city lights often confuse them. “If they get caught in clouds they get disorientated and
are attracted to pools of light,” he says. “In misty, foggy conditions the illumination of cities can create a big pool of generalized light that they are attracted to. So the birds lose the moon and stars and basically don't know what they are doing and crash into buildings.”

It happens a lot on offshore oil rigs in the North Sea, he says. “You can get quite big bird wrecks on the North Sea platforms because they are well lit. Under certain conditions birds will come down, get disorientated, and fly around and around the lights and eventually crash into the rig or the sea.”

There are biological factors at play too. Birds just don't see the world in the same way we do. Because our eyes are in the front of our heads and there's a lot of overlap in what we see through each eyeball, we see the world as something that lies directly ahead of us. Most birds, however, have eyes on either side of their head, so even when they look ahead there's very little overlap between what they see with each eye, giving them a less complete picture of the world directly in front of them.