Indoors, draw the curtains and close the blinds after dark. The same is true for hooded lights that direct the illumination downward rather than into the sky. Lights triggered by motion detectors are far less dangerous for birds than continuously burning lights, for example. If you can’t turn off all your lights, identify the ones that are truly necessary and reduce the wattage or reorient them in a way that is safer for wildlife. 11 memorial lights are now turned off for 20 minutes at a time to give disoriented birds a chance to disperse. That study points the way to other accommodations.
Before you turn off the lights windows#
The researchers found that merely darkening the windows resulted in a roughly 60 percent reduction in bird mortality. Louis and a host of other cities, large and small, are working to create safe passage for migrating birds.īirds are in profound crisis, and these efforts can make a measurable difference in their populations: A 2021 study by Field Museum scientists analyzed 20 years of data collected at Chicago’s McCormick Place convention center. Atlanta, Boston, Cleveland, Dallas, Denver, Indianapolis, Miami, Minneapolis-St. This is why lights-out initiatives are spreading across the country. Soon, we can’t remember doing things differently. Wilson said in an email.Īt our best as a species, this is what we do: We change our ways to protect others, and then we adjust to the new ways. The human population has also adjusted: “Initially, I did receive complaints that the cross was too dimly lit, but everyone is used to it now,” Mr. In the six years since the university dimmed the lights, no dead birds have been reported at the foot of the cross. Within hours of finding the dead birds, the university’s offices of Environmental Stewardship & Sustainability and Physical Plant Services came up with an alternative: According to Nathan Wilson, the domain manager at Sewanee, they simply swapped out the two 1,000-watt halogen lamps with two 400-watt-equivalent LED clusters. or the vast Canadian boreal forest is winging through the Southeast.”īut the conundrum wasn’t irresolvable, as it turned out. Haskell wrote, “Every bird taking the overland route from the northern U.S. But birds can’t migrate safely without darkness, and the forests surrounding the university are part of a critical flyway for migrating birds. Students can’t safely wander around a park on the edge of a deadly bluff in the pitch-black night.
The university faced what seemed to be an irresolvable conundrum. The pictures in his post have haunted me ever since. That’s a problem for migrating birds, as the biologist and celebrated nonfiction author David George Haskell noted in a blog post about what happened one cloudy night in September, when more than 130 birds got caught in the light dome and died. There is no other ambient light in the deeply forested area. War Memorial Cross is illuminated at night by spotlights. At any given time, tens of thousands of them may be right overhead.Ĭonsider what happened in 2016 at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tenn., where a giant cross rises 60 feet above a grassy park at the very edge of the Cumberland Plateau. It’s mind-boggling to check the real-time migration map at BirdCast each night and discover just how many millions of birds are migrating and where they are. The height of the fall migration season runs from around mid-September to around mid-October. Artificial lights attract birds, which then become disoriented, crashing into windows, buildings and one another or flying until they collapse, unable to see their way past the light. At night, when most birds migrate, lights pose another threat. Expanses of glass - windows without mullions, storm doors, skyscrapers - are the worst.ĭuring the daytime, glass reflects the living world: It tricks birds into thinking that the sky lies safely before them, though what actually lies ahead is an invisible, neck-breaking solidity. Migrating birds are vulnerable to many hazards: predators, extreme weather, insufficient food and insufficient water. This one was migrating to its wintering grounds, either here or farther south. Yellow-rumped warblers don’t breed in Middle Tennessee. A living warbler does not lie with its elegant passerine toes curled into a tiny cage of tiny bones holding nothing. I knew it was dead before I opened the storm door.
NASHVILLE - One morning last fall, during the height of the songbird migration, I opened my door to the glorious autumn light and saw a yellow-rumped warbler lying on my front stoop.
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