Birders
Related: About this forumUp to 1,500 birds flew into Philly skyscrapers one day last week. The slaughter shook birdwatchers.
Stephen Maciejewski dropped to a knee on a Center City sidewalk Wednesday morning and gently scooped up a yellow-billed cuckoo that had smashed into a skyscraper and died on its way to Central America or the West Indies.
This probably happened yesterday, said Maciejewski, a 71-year-old retired social worker and volunteer for Audubon Pennsylvania. He labeled a plastic bag with the time, date and location, tucked the slim migrator into it, and continued his rounds.
Maciejewski gets emotional when he speaks about all the birds he finds, but nothing, he says, prepared him for what happened on Friday.
So many birds were falling out of the sky we didnt know what was going on," he said, choking up. "It was a really catastrophic event. The last time something like this happened was in 1948.
On Friday, an estimated 1,000 to 1,500 birds flew into buildings in Center City overnight and into early morning during what he Maciejewski called a perfect storm of avian calamity.
He collected 400 birds during between 5 and 8 a.m. in the three-square-block radius he regularly covers an astonishing number, according to a Pennsylvania Audubon official.
There were so many, I was picking up five at a time," Maciejewski said. One guy from building maintenance dumped 75 living and dead birds in front of me as if it were a collection."
https://www.inquirer.com/news/birds-center-city-philadelphia-audubon-october-2-2020-20201007.html
elleng
(130,825 posts)This is complicated stuff, he said.
It appears weather events lined up for the worse during what was likely the peak of migratory birds' flight from Canada, Maine, upstate New York and elsewhere toward Central and South America. A sudden plunge in temperatures could have prompted the birds to start their flights en masse.>>>
Blues Heron
(5,931 posts)these types of people just aren't in touch with the natural world.