After reading about a bird collision that killed nearly 1,000 birds at Chicago’s McCormick Place Convention Center two years ago, local artist Holly Greenberg felt inspired. 

Following a recent move to Evanston, Greenberg opened up a studio last month and set out to bring 10,863 birds back to life through her art.

Greenberg is crafting thousands of life-sized bird sculptures out of upcycled cloth and donated materials, one for each dead bird discovered by the Chicago Bird Collision Monitors across the city in 2023.

“I felt the world, especially Chicagoans, needed to see that this was happening,” Greenberg said. 

To encourage community participation and raise bird awareness, Greenberg is hosting public workshops at her studio in the 2nd Ward on the first Saturday of each month.

Greenberg said she hopes to get as much help as possible to craft the birds. She aims to complete the project by 2028 and plans to sew all of the birds onto a 300-foot-long “carpet” — roughly the length of a football field. Greenberg hopes to send the finished piece around the country as an art installation. 

Over 2,000 birds have been made so far, Greenberg said. For the project, Greenberg received a grant from Sustain Evanston, a city organization that funds small sustainability projects. 

“Evanston is environmentally aware — they already have bird safe ordinances, so most people have heard about the bird crash of 2023,” Greenberg said. “There are lots of people who this is news to, so they come in and they learn something new.”

Workshop participants are given a specific bird species to replicate, and they craft their birds by gluing cloth onto pre-sewn bird sculptures made by Greenberg’s team. Then, they tag the bird with their name, hometown, creation date and the bird’s scientific name so they can find their bird on the finished carpet.

Greenberg also gives out window-treating kits and shares strategies to reduce bird collisions during her workshops. She said she recommends homeowners put something on the outside of their windows in order to break the reflection that birds see, whether it be a simple screen or small white adhesive dots. 

Sarah Brotherton participated in Greenberg’s workshop on Saturday. As a volunteer bird monitor, Brotherton walks around a designated route once a week and collects dead and injured birds she finds on the ground.  

“At the end of the time frame, the birds that have been collected from the various sectors downtown are brought to one location and that driver drives the live birds to a specified location, and then the dead birds are taken down to the Field Museum,” Brotherton said.

Allison Sloan is on the Bird-Friendly Evanston Committee and has been a bird monitor for over 20 years. After moving to Evanston in 2015, Sloan said she noticed several dead birds on Northwestern’s campus. She recorded the amount of dead birds she found at the Frances Searle Building for a year and presented the problem to the University. A line patterned film was subsequently placed on the building.

Sloan said she is excited about Greenberg’s project because of the way it encourages community members to engage hands-on. 

“I think that’s going to have a beautiful and long lasting effect in terms of public awareness of this issue,” Sloan said.

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