A Rocha USA Blog

Lights Out for Birds

by John Humphreys

Millions of birds die each year by slamming into illuminated skyscraper windows at night.

What a ghastly waste of life. And so avoidable!

There are a number of projects across the continent that are trying to do something. The problem is particularly bad at the time of peak migration, when – of course – birds are doing a lot of flying over and through cities at night.

New York City Audubon has, for the last five years, asked the owners of skyscrapers to switch lights off at night, and has requested that late workers ‘draw blinds or use desk lamps rather than using ceiling-mounted lighting’. The problem is that these poor birds get dazzled, baffled and disoriented by artificial lights, especially when flying lower than normal in bad weather. Happily, such initiatives really work – there are far fewer carcasses found at the base when the suggestions are heeded (of course, predators tend to vacuum up dead and dying birds really quickly, so researchers have to patrol the ground below when studying the problem). If you are interested, see Audubon's work on the parallel problem in Spring.

 The city of Toronto is making great strides, too. The “Fatal Light Awareness Program” reports that ‘each year in Toronto, over a million birds are killed by colliding with buildings.’ They have a sad (dead) woodpecker as their logo. In response, they are developing bird-friendly development guidelines for Toronto and run their own “lights out” campaign.

 I am cheered by these projects, but cannot be too sanguine. These are two cities out of many  – admittedly major ones – that are only just getting their act together as to how big a danger these lighted buildings pose to migratory birds. These skyscrapers are the inanimate version of those lines of 'kill-all" hunters that greet flyover birds in Malta and elsewhere in Europe. For details of this decidedly unsporting approach to hunting, see this piece by BirdLife International.    

How many other cities have this problem with no one to care about it? Not just in the North American continent – globally?

The unintended massacre of birds by buildings has to be added to intentional killing and habitat destruction as a MAJOR issue in the decline, worldwide, of so many of our bird species: not just the obvious rare ones, but many common ones too. The majority of our bird species globally are in decline. Now is the time to act. Get better informed by visiting the key scientific sites of Audubon and BirdLife International.

*Humphreys is a biochemist working in pharmaceutical software. Mad about natural history since the age of 5, he is an ardent conservationist and pragmatic environmentalist.