Feral Cities

by Tristan Donovan

  But as the white-crowned sparrows of San Francisco show, urban birds can’t sit still. The city is constantly changing, and birds hoping to cash in on the food available in the city need to keep pace with an ever-changing environment. For some birds that challenge is just too much. “There’s two very different sides to the story,” says Kimball. “In order to create cities like L.A., we totally obliterated hundreds of square miles of habitat, some of it very specialized with very unique species. We destroyed it all. Some birds are habitat specialists and don’t tolerate urbanization.”

  Others thrive for a while only to end up defeated. One such bird is the spotted dove, a pigeon-like bird with a dusty pink breast. Native to Southeast Asia, they were brought to Los Angeles in 1915 and soon became a regular sight around the city. “It became one of the most abundant birds in urban and suburban Los Angeles and beyond,” says Kimball. “Then, starting in the 1970s, their populations just started dropping. People hardly even noticed until they were virtually gone by the 1990s. Now we just have a few little pockets of them here and there.”

  Why the spotted dove went from urban success story to near-extinction remains a mystery. Nest-raiding by crows is a possibility, disease another, but the truth is no one knows for sure. “Why were urban habitats so good for them and then suddenly, within a couple of decades, did they die out? And why did they die out when we still have mourning doves all over L.A.? Presumably they eat more or less the same things and have more or less the same predators, so why are mourning doves still common? Maybe the mourning doves are having the same problems, but there are millions more of them elsewhere in Southern California that are constantly recolonizing the city.”

  While birds like the spotted dove shine brightly but briefly in the city, for others it is nothing but a death trap.

  THE CHICAGO BIRD MASSACRE

  Saving Migratory Birds in Downtown Chicago

  It’s quarter past five in the morning and Chicago is dark and enveloped in fog. I’m waiting outside the Wrigley Building on North Michigan Avenue for Annette Prince, director of the Chicago Bird Collision Monitors. She’s just called to say she’s running late and suggests I check for injured or dead birds near the chewing gum giant’s headquarters while I wait.

  This is what the hundred or so Chicago Bird Collision Monitors do. Early every morning, while most of the city is asleep or getting ready for work, these volunteers are combing downtown streets looking for birds that have crashed into skyscrapers.

  With time to kill, I figure what the hell and start scanning the sidewalk. It looks empty. The only signs of life are a few eager joggers, some night shift workers waiting for the bus home, and a homeless man, who is methodically checking the bins.

  Oh, and the woman in the median of Michigan Avenue.

  She stands out. Mainly because she’s standing on the concrete surrounding the median’s flower bed, singing a mournful hymn. Her voice is beautiful but she looks deranged, her eyes glaring at the city as she belts out what sounds like a Hildegard of Bingen number to an imaginary audience. With her haunting vocal cutting through the mist, it all feels very gothic and it’s about to get even more so.

  Out of the corner of my eye I see something on the floor next to a ground floor window. I can’t tell what it is from where I am; it might be a leaf or some litter. I head over for a closer look.

  It soon becomes clear what it is: a dead bird about the size of a pigeon. Its yellow breast faces up to the sky, its black wings patterned with white lines. As I get nearer, I notice that its head is missing. Then, I see the ants.

  Thousands of tiny ants are crawling all over the headless bird. Gruesome as the sight is, I’m kind of impressed that so many ants could eke out a life in this concrete corner of the city. For them the arrival of the dead bird must be like having all their Christmases come at once, a gift from the ant gods.

  Just as I’m wondering where the bird’s head is, I see it. It’s twenty feet away resting upright in the middle of the sidewalk. A jogger runs right over it, missing the head with its scarlet crown and neck by less than an inch. She didn’t even seem to notice it was there.

  As I’m taking in this macabre scene, complete with ghostly mist and the eerie melody of the woman on the median, Annette calls me again. “Almost there,” she says.

  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 bla
ck 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 f
eet 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.

  Also, their frontal vision seems to be about helping them accurately target nearby objects with their beaks rather than seeing what lies ahead. Instead, their sideways vision does most of the work in detecting their surroundings. Even then, the way they perceive the world during flight is more about spotting movement than detail. When in flight birds are looking for predators, prey, food, other members of their flock, and potential nesting sites, and as such when they are draw into cities by the lights they aren’t looking ahead but to the sides.