It’s Bird Migration Month and millions of birds are taking part in the Great Central American Flyaway, in which they abandon the Upper Midwest and head to the tropics en masse for the winter. Unseasonably warm temps had kept them fixed in place through the end of September, but with the arrival of a cold front last week they took belated wing. Almost 1.5 million birds were recorded in flight over Cook County the night of October 4-5. This Chicago birder marked it as “the best birding day of my life,” rising at dawn to watch more than half a million birds fly over his Hyde Park neighborhood alone. He recorded scores upon scores of robins, wood ducks, Wilson’s Snipes, Swainson’s Thrushes, all the warblers, all the sparrows, 665 CEDAR WAXWINGS. The list goes on.
The skies rang with birdsong — or so I’m told, because I was downstate in Springfield at a conference when this great migration took place. I only learned of it through a news item alerting me to its sad collateral: in what BirdCast calls “a major bird window collision event,” thousands of those birds never made it past the city. Distracted by the lights, they crashed into the window of downtown buildings and died. A staggering 961 birds were killed in collisions with our McCormick Place Convention Center alone, a massacre-by-glass that made the New York Times, which reports that the “carpet of bird carcasses” found outside the massive convention complex the morning of October 5 stunned volunteers and scientists from the nearby Field Museum, which monitors bird traffic in the area.
I arrived home from Springfield after dark the night after this mass casualty event. On the approach to the Loop, the skyline glowed, ablaze in pink — because this October brings us not only migrating birds but Breast Cancer Awareness and an endless sea of pink-tinged cheer.
It’s easy to dismiss it all as harmlessly tone-deaf marketing. This rose-pink flat iron and hair dryer set, for example, is the perfect gift for that friend who’s been through chemo and has no hair. But pinkwashing is a well-documented scourge. Since 2002, the activist organization Breast Cancer Action has run a “Think Before You Pink” political education campaign calling for accountability around pink-ribbon marketing by the breast cancer industry — or, in their words, the “unrestrained culture of profit-before-people (i.e., rampant, unregulated capitalism) [that] is the common culprit underlying twenty years of pink ribbon marketing campaigns.”
With furious conviction BCA has for 20 years called out the corporations, mega-nonprofits, and government agencies engaged in fostering “awareness” while shilling everything from pink-ribbon Post-It notes manufactured with toxic PFAS with a documented link to cancer to pink-ribbon Bank of America credit cards to pink-branded buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken. This year, BCA’s expanded their campaign beyond targeting a single pink-ribbon product to focus on the connections between environmental racism, fossil fuel divestment, and breast cancer, and center political education as a means to effect change and address the root causes of a public health crisis that affects one in eight women and nonbinary individuals.
The Susan B. Komen Foundation has been called out in particular for not just flooding the breast cancer space with those credit cards and chicken but for its deafening celebration of “survivorship” — in breast cancer lingo, persons who have gone five years post-treatment without a recurrence — that marginalizes the experience of people living with metastatic breast cancer. People whose treatment never ends, and thus can never claim that mantle of “survivor.” People who could benefit the most, in other words, from those monies Komen is charged with inadequately directing towards breast cancer research, whose suffering can be seen as collateral damage as the massive machine of “awareness” rolls on.
This year’s Komen Race for the Cure takes place October 28 at Soldier Field, sandwiched between the convention center and the Field Museum, where flats of dead birds are now meals for flesh-eating beetles. I’d vaguely been considering running. I mean, I do love a 5k, and I’m not immune to the comfort found in communities of affinity. I’m not a monster. And Komen’s been trying to rebrand — “More Than Pink!” — of late, and they’ve been busily platforming the stories of Stage 4 patients. Good for them, even if it’s a little late. But as I slide up on the one-year anniversary of the end of chemo this week, I’m preoccupied with the stories of those who don’t survive their journey.
The collateral damage from those pink lights downtown might not be confined to birds.
I’m preoccupied this week as well with processing the horror of events in Israel and Gaza. In moments of crisis I tend to go dark. It’s not a trait I’m proud of. But I struggle to find words to do justice to the enormity of this moment and I don’t want to engage in uninformed both-sidesism. Martha Gellhorn wrote that to bear witness the suffering of war and to write well about it was not a profession but an ethical act. I look to those who have that ethical compass — I appreciated this Naomi Klein piece, and welcome your suggestions — and I pray for peace and for justice.
If you’d like to sign an Audubon Society petition to urge McCormick Place to turn off its lights, here’s a link.
I had seen the horrible news about the birds that collided with tall windows in Chicago - adding more misery and sadness to a very difficult time. Thank you for sharing the petition urging the city of Chicago to turn off lights during migratory periods - I just signed it. And so it's handy for anyone who sees this note - here it is: https://www.chicagoaudubon.org/blog/2023/10/11/petition-mccormick-place-to-keep-its-lights-out-during-migration?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
if you could report on those lights, that would be amazing. I called and wrote the alderman's office, but of course, got no response. I probably comment to everyone and anyone who would listen, but ran out of steam...