Up to 1,500 birds flew into Philly skyscrapers one day last week. The slaughter shook birdwatchers. [View all]

[douglas9]

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 didn’t 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