Decorated eggs are a centuries-old Easter tradition, but nature’s been at it eons longer no dyes required. Take a look inside the Field Museum’s egg collection.
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‘40,000 birds later’
In 1978, Willard, the Field Museum’s collections manager emeritus, heard an offhand remark about birds hitting the McCormick Place, North America’s largest convention center, which is a mile south of the museum. So, he investigated.
“I went down early one morning, just out of curiosity, and wandered around and actually found four or five dead birds,” Willard says. “I might not have gone back if I hadn’t found anything that first day, and now here we are, 40 years later and 40,000 birds later.”
Willard and his colleagues, including Field Museum coauthor Mary Hennen and volunteers from the Chicago Bird Collision Monitors, have visited the site every day before sunrise during migration season, sometimes as early as 3:30 in the morning.