Greenwire: Windy City Dem crusades against bird-killing buildings

This article originally appeared in Greenwire on August 6, 2013.

Whitney Blair Wyckoff, E&E reporter

During an early morning stroll with activists near downtown Chicago several years ago, Rep. Mike Quigley (D-Ill.) was shocked to find dozens of dead birds at his feet.

"I looked down and there were literally dozens of beautiful dead birds that had crashed" into the buildings, Quigley said. "This got to me."

The American Bird Conservancy estimates that as many as 1 billion birds die after crashing into buildings each year.

Quigley's hometown of Chicago, in particular, is a significant threat to birds. The city of 2.7 million people is located along the Mississippi River bird migration route and just south of a large concentration of forests. As birds pass through the urban area, its iconic skyline can pose a threat.

"With climate change, unfortunately, you're seeing birds of wider varieties spend a longer time, if not the whole year, in Chicago," said Quigley, who has a tree and a pond in his yard for birds. "So we need to make it a safer place for them."

The sight of the corpses littering the sidewalk encouraged Quigley, then a county commissioner, to develop and eventually pass a change to Cook County building ordinances. Cook now requires all its buildings to conform to bird-friendly standards.

And now Quigley is pushing to do something similar at the federal level. He has offered legislation (H.R. 2078) for the third time that would require the federal government's landlord, the General Services Administration, to use bird-safe building materials and design features where possible. The agency separately is looking into the issue.

Across the continent, local and state governments are working to adopt bird-friendly building requirements.

San Francisco, Toronto and Oakland, Calif., have all enacted laws or regulations promoting bird-safe buildings.

In Minnesota, a state also situated along the Mississippi River flyway, officials just folded bird-safe building requirements into the May update of their state sustainable buildings guidelines. The rules apply to buildings that receive state funding -- anything from museums to stadiums.

Joanna Eckles of Minnesota Audubon said the requirements ban completely transparent glass for outside railings and restrict how much of a building can be glass, among other requirements.

Avian advocates say making buildings safer for birds is crucial. But just because a building adheres to green building guidelines does not necessarily make it bird-safe.

In fact, many of the buildings certified as Platinum under the U.S. Green Building Council's Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, or LEED, program are the biggest "bird killers," said Annette Prince, director of the Chicago Bird Collision Monitors.

"They rank very high in LEED standards because they incorporate a lot of energy savings, which often involves a high percentage of glass," she said. "And that is counterproductive to bird safety."

Christine Sheppard, bird collisions campaign manager at the American Bird Conservancy, said the amount of glass on a building is the No. 1 contributing factor to bird-strike risk. According to a guide on bird-friendly buildings put out by the bird conservation group, glass presents a few problems: Birds can fly into glass that is too transparent, and they can attempt to perch on glass that mirrors nearby shrubbery.

Lighting and vegetation also can factor into a building's bird safety.

LEED has recognized the issue. Now it offers a pilot credit for structures that integrate bird-safe building concepts into their design.

Building designers warm up to bird-friendly building

Slowly, architects have begun integrating bird-friendly concepts into their designs, but a few firms are blazing the trail, conservationists said.

MacArthur Fellow Jeanne Gang, who is the founder of the Chicago-based Studio Gang Architects, received recognition from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals for incorporating bird-friendly elements into her acclaimed Aqua Tower in Chicago. The building features wavy, asymmetrical balconies on its exterior and uses glass with small gray marks that make it easier for birds to see, although Gang said her firm wasn't "100 percent sure" about the impact the building's design would have on bird deaths before it went up.

"The whole purpose [of bird-safe building] is to preserve our biodiversity, because it's important to our environment and to us as human beings to have that," she said. "It's a part of the whole interconnected network of life."

Architects for Philadelphia-based firm KieranTimberlake, another leader in bird-safe building design, started looking into bird-safe building when they discovered that a LEED Platinum building they designed was killing birds.

"It was really something that wasn't on anyone's radar at that time," said Roderick Bates, a senior researcher and associate with the firm's research group.

Now the firm has a researcher whose sole task is to study bird-safe building, and, as part of the design process, every building it designs receives a bird-friendliness evaluation. The group also conducts its own research to cultivate a better understanding of bird-friendly design.

But not all architects believe that imposing bird-safe building requirements is a good thing. Bates, speaking for himself and not on behalf of KieranTimberlake, said integrating bird-friendly building requires nuance. It's difficult to mandate such a precise process through a top-down approach, he said.

But Gang disagrees. She said requirements can make it easier for clients to persuade owners to integrate bird-safe elements into their buildings.

"Just like with LEED or any other type of thing that makes a building perform better," she said. "If there's a cost to it, it's hard to get people to sign on to those things."