In the West Loop, the Windy City Bird Lab has secured $384,000 in funding from the Illinois Audubon Society to support its operations for the next three years. Located at 1426 W Washington Blvd., the lab serves as a central space for bird-related education and research initiatives in Chicago.
J’orge Garcia, founder of the Windy City Bird Lab, described his vision for an inclusive space that brings together people with different skills and interests to contribute to conservation science. “It is really about enabling people with all sorts of skills and interests to be able to contribute to conservation science, or bird science,” Garcia said.
Garcia’s interest in birds began around six years ago after working in tech education at Harold Washington Library’s Maker Lab. He later joined Openlands, a nonprofit organization, where he led the Birds in My Neighborhood project aimed at teaching elementary students about birds through outdoor activities.
Combining his background in technology with ornithology, Garcia collaborated on projects like the Chicago Bird Migration Monitoring Network. This initiative uses microphones placed atop buildings to monitor migrating birds across Chicago, with collected data displayed on an interactive online dashboard.
As part of these efforts, Garcia and colleagues developed the Grosbeak Horn Microphone—a weatherproof device designed to record bird sounds above city buildings. After this research became independent from Openlands, Garcia moved into mHUB and expanded into other projects such as producing decoy black-crowned night herons intended to encourage real birds to nest at Jackson Park and Big Marsh.
The new Windy City Bird Lab facility offers meeting rooms, storage areas, office spaces, and a fabrication room equipped with tools like a 3D printer. Plans include planting native vegetation outside to attract more birds and possibly partnering with local businesses interested in bird-friendly practices.
To help achieve these goals, Garcia has hired two staff members: David Bild will oversee educational programs like Birds in My Neighborhood, while Deja Perkins—a forestry professor at Tuskegee University—will focus on development and organizational growth. Perkins envisions the lab as a center for community engagement and workforce development within conservation fields. “We’ve been dreaming about what it could look like to do this work in this space for a very long time,” Perkins said.
The recent funding comes from a bequest by Pamela Vawter through her will for advancing bird research in northeastern Illinois. Nathan Goldberg, director of Conservation Science at Illinois Audubon Society, expressed optimism about the lab’s future: “We believe in J’orge and the Windy City Bird Lab, and we believe that this is an organization, or a program, or a lab, or a space, that has immense potential,” Goldberg said.
Lab leaders aim not only to promote bird science but also create opportunities for those traditionally underrepresented in conservation careers. By fostering greater community involvement around birds and nature policy advocacy efforts may also grow stronger.
Garcia emphasized that having a dedicated space can unite various groups of bird enthusiasts throughout the year: “If we had a space where we can pull those folks in, then we’d be able to create better tools, whether through volunteership or through just continual gatherings and projects that we can work on together,” he said. “So building this home for that was really important to me.”
