With a neon-green net in hand, Annette Prince briskly walks around downtown Chicago, Illinois, at dawn. She looks left. She looks right.

It’s not long before she spots a tiny yellow bird sitting on the concrete. It doesn’t fly away. She quickly nets the bird, gently places it inside a paper bag, and labels the bag with the date, time, and place.

“This is a Nashville warbler,” she says. Ms. Prince is the director of the Chicago Bird Collision Monitors. That group watches for birds that crash into buildings. She says this bird likely flew into a glass window. “He must only weigh about two pennies. He’s squinting his eyes because his head hurts.”

This happens hundreds of times each spring and fall. Migrating birds fly into homes, small buildings, and sometimes skyscrapers. In October 2023, 1,000 migrating birds died on a single night. They had all flown into a huge glass building called McCormick Place. 

This fall, a similar building got a new, bird-safe window film. It wasn’t cheep. It cost $1.2 million to install tiny dots all over the outside of the building. The dots spread along enough glass to cover two football fields!

It seems to be helping. Just 20 birds have died after flying into the building so far this fall. 

Rescuers take injured birds to local wildlife rehabilitation centers to recover. Veterinarian Darcy Stephenson works at one of these centers. One morning, she gives a yellow-bellied sapsucker anesthetic gas. That makes the bird more comfortable while she treats it. She tapes its wings open for an X-ray. The bird arrived with a note from a rescue group: “Window collision.” (Collision means crash.)

She finds the bird has a broken ulna—a bone in the wing. 

Fractures heal quickly with a vet’s help. Then healthy birds are set free.

Look at the birds of the air: They neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? — Matthew 6:26