Most early mornings in the spring and fall, as he has done for more than four decades, David Willard goes out to gather the dead. A retired curator of birds at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History, Willard walks the mile from his office, in the dark, to pick up the thrushes, warblers, sparrows, and other migrating birds that have met their end against the glass walls of McCormick Place, a giant modernist rectangle on the Lake Michigan shore. The dead birds go into a plastic grocery bag. Those that are stunned but still alive he slips into a paper sandwich bag, to be released later in the brush on a nearby hill.
Originally built in 1960 in a city park, McCormick Place is the largest convention center in North America. Thanks to the diligence of Willard and his colleagues, it has also earned a wide reputation as a killer of…
Read the full article originally published at e360.yale.edu.