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Almost 1,000 migrating songbirds have perished after smashing into windows at an exhibition center on Chicago's lakefront. According to officials at the Chicago Field Museum, 964 birds were found dead Thursday at the McCormick Place Lakeside Center. David Willard, the museum's collections manager emeritus, says the most dead birds anyone has found at one time at the center in the last 40 years was around 265. Experts say conditions were optimal for songbirds to launch their annual fall nocturnal migration to Central America on Wednesday evening. Pre-dawn rain pushed them down into the city, wh...

“It was just like a carpet of dead birds at the windows there."

"When it was built, people weren't thinking about bird safety. They still aren't in most architecture. It's right on the lakefront."

The birds hit McCormick Place Lakeside Center windows, the result, according to experts, of migration conditions, rain and the hall lights and windows.

David Willard has been checking the grounds of Chicago's lakefront exhibition center for dead birds for 40 years. “It was just like a carpet of dead birds at the windows there,” said Willard, a retired bird division collections manager at the Chicago Field Museum, where his duties included administering, preserving and cataloging the museum's collection of 500,000 bird specimens as well as searching for bird strikes as part of migration research.