Bird-advocacy project CALM relies on a rooftop perch at Symphony Center

Artist and activist Alice Hargrave vividly recalls what sparked her interest in birds. But it’s not a happy memory. “It was hearing the last call of the last male in a now-extinct species of Hawaiian bird called the Kauaʻi ʻōʻō,” she says. “Its voice was dying out, calling to a non-existent female, and it was just gut-wrenching. I also saw it visually as sound wave patterns on a screen.”

More than hearing it, her experience of seeing the bird’s fading voice spurred Hargrave to begin photographing the sound wave patterns of various bird calls and transforming them into art on paper, fabric and glass. (Come spring, her newest installation can be seen at the Bryn Mawr CTA Red Line station.) Also, Hargrave says, “The birds started speaking and shouting at me to pay attention to them," so she started to do so.

Inspired by the work of Gerald Adelmann, president emeritus of Openlands, a locally based urban conservation advocacy group, Hargrave is central to another related nature-art project — one that involves a host of Chicago-area buildings and cultural institutions, including the Adler Planetarium, the Field Museum, Willis Tower — and as of 2023, Symphony Center. Originally dubbed CALM (Chicago Avian Listening at Midnight), it’s now the Chicago Bird Migration Monitoring Network and recently capped its fourth season. (Hargrave still uses the catchy CALM acronym for any public art, visual storytelling and publicity related to the initiative.)

“I’ve always been interested in science and finding ways to visualize environmental or scientific information,” Hargrave says.

Working with the project’s lead scientist, Benjamin Van Doren, an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and John Maas, the CSO’s director of facilities, Hargrave helped install a rooftop recording device that captures the sounds of migratory birds (many thousands of them) at night. The first device, set up in spring 2023, ran on batteries that died and needed replacing, Maas says. A newer plug-in model was installed in spring 2024.

Collected data — most recently recorded between Aug. 30 and Nov.15 at Symphony Center — was then channeled through a machine-learning acoustic-monitoring program called Nighthawk that was developed by Van Doren and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in Ithaca, New York. The results are viewable, broken down by species, on this interactive website.

In 2024, the CSO’s equipment picked up the sounds of numerous different species, including the yellow-rumped warbler, Swainson’s thrush, the American redstart and the palm warbler.

Hargrave’s main goal is to bring more awareness to the plight of migratory birds in Chicago. Situated in one of the busiest migratory pathways, the Mississippi Flyway, it remains the nation’s most dangerous city for birds; nearly 1,000 died on one day alone at McCormick Place Lakeside Center in 2023. (Birds migrating overnight were distracted by the building’s internal and external lights.) 

Meanwhile, she also pushes for additional regulations that will offer birds more protection: “Our main goal is to protect birds in our region and to advocate for bird safety regulations like lights out during migration and bird-safety regulations to require bird-safe glass.”

And things are slowly starting to improve (there was no repeat of the McCormick incident in 2024), but there’s much more to be done. As ever, art will continue to play a key role in Hargrave’s efforts. She even envisions the melding of CSO bird recordings with classical music — maybe even an original composition performed by members of the CSO. French composer-organist and ornithologist Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) was known for his extensive use of birdsong in his work. In addition, the Chicago Ornithological Society has an overview of birdsong and classical music on its site.

“Go big,” Hargrave says, “or go home.”