‘Please do something.’ Hundreds of birds crash into New York City skyscrapers

Although Melissa Breyer is used to picking up dead migratory birds, the amount that lay scattered Tuesday in New York City was shocking.

Breyer is a volunteer with NYC Audubon, an organization that tracks how many birds die migrating through the city, according to her Twitter page.

In just over an hour, she collected 226 lifeless birds that had crashed into skyscrapers around the World Trade Center complex on Tuesday, she wrote on Twitter.

Another 35 were either too mangled or inaccessible to pick up. Thirty more birds were taken to a wild bird rehabilitation center.

“When you have 226 dead window-struck migratory birds from one morning, it’s hard to get them all in one photo,” she tweeted alongside a picture documenting the incident.

“Lights can be turned off, windows can be treated. Please do something,” she said.

Breyer’s tweets got the attention of the World Trade Center.

“Thank you for bringing this to our attention,” they wrote. “We care deeply for wild birds and protecting their habitat. We are actively encouraging our office tenants to turn off their lights at night and lower their blinds wherever possible and are investigating additional precautions.”

Bird collisions on Manhattan skyscrapers is a problem that “NYC Audubon has documented for years,” especially during spring and fall migrations, The Associated Press reported.

The city’s stormy weather Monday night could have also contributed to the mass bird die-off, Kaitlyn Parkins, the group’s associate director of conservation and science, told AP.

“It seems that the storm might have brought the birds in lower than they would have otherwise have been, or just disoriented them,” Parkins told the outlet. “The effects of nocturnal light on birds is also quite strong, especially when it’s a cloudy night.”

Between 90,000 and 230,000 birds are killed annually from colliding with buildings in New York City, according to research by NYC Audubon. Nationwide, research suggests that “365 million to 1 billion birds are killed annually in collisions with windows.”

This story was originally published September 17, 2021 at 12:01 PM with the headline "‘Please do something.’ Hundreds of birds crash into New York City skyscrapers."

Karina Mazhukhina

McClatchy DC

Karina Mazhukhina is a McClatchy Real-Time News Reporter. She graduated from the University of Washington and was previously a digital journalist for KOMO News, an ABC-TV affiliate in Seattle.