In total, around 1,500 birds died that night. Disorientated by cloud and fog, however, they are thought to have been drawn off course by the city lights and smashed into the glass buildings. Normally migratory birds use celestial cues such as the stars to help them navigate. "The birds were flying fairly low," says Jason Weckstein, the associate curator of ornithology at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University. The deaths were the result of a mass collision event, caused by a combination of overnight conditions: a low cloud ceiling, fog and rain. "I just put them in a big plastic bag." It was clearly upsetting for Maciejewski – his voice cracks with emotion as he reveals that he ended up collecting around 400 dead birds that day. "After a while I just couldn't keep up… it got so overwhelming that I stopped putting them in individual bags," he says. A few minutes later, someone else told him about a pile further up the street.
Maciejewski was kneeling on the pavement picking up a clutch of dead birds when someone ran up and pointed out another cluster around the corner. Maciejewski bags and labels dead birds and scoops up those that are simply dazed, moving them out of the way of hurrying commuters.īut the morning of Friday 2 October 2020 was different. The unfortunate creatures end up there after crashing into the city's brightly-lit skyscrapers. Maciejewski – a volunteer with the conservation non-profit Audubon Pennsylvania – has walked the exact same route for years, looking for birds lying on the pavement.
He woke up at 04:30 and by 05:30 he was in downtown Philadelphia ready to start his patrol. It started like any other day for Stephen Maciejewski.
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