Science: Bird-Killing Tower

A hawk last week perched on the balcony outside the Van Sweringen brothers’ private suite on the 34th floor of their high Cleveland Terminal Tower Building. The hawk twisted his head and coldly looked far down at the pigeons strutting, the sparrows hopping on Cleveland’s Public Square. They pecked away at crumbs, peanuts, popcorn. The hawk turned his head away. He darted it down at what one of his claws held, a strange bird killed at the tower while migrating southward for winter.

Clevelanders last week learned why the hawk fed leisurely outside the Van Sweringen windows. Atop the 54-story tower building is a huge beacon. Birds migrating at night are blinded by the glare, dash against the building, drop broken-bodied to the balcony projection.

The situation, however, is useful to ornithology. From the balcony Harold Lester Madison, acting director of Cleveland’s Museum of Natural History, is getting data on the birds which migrate across the district and on the relation of atmospheric conditions to the height to which birds fly. But such usefulness cannot last very long, because birds somehow learn to avoid man-built obstacles.