Photo: Purple Martins, Keith Kingdon/Audubon Photography Awards
Over 100 million birds will migrate through northern Virginia in the next two months. Tundra Swans, Dark-eyed Juncos, and other winter visitors have departed for their breeding grounds, while warblers, tanagers, phoebes, flycatchers, and other species are making their way from Central and South America to or through our area.
Eighty percent of our migrating birds migrate at night. They use a variety of cues to keep themselves on track, including the stars, Earth’s magnetic field, geographic landmarks, and genetics. However, excessive lights at night can be deadly for them. Some birds crash into lighted buildings at night, injuring or killing themselves. The worst recent example is the McCormack Place Convention Center, where over 1,000 birds died in one night, but smaller numbers of birds die from window collisions at night throughout the country. Other birds are distracted from their migration routes by lighted buildings and fly around the lights much like moths attracted to a light. They waste the precious energy they need to get to their breeding grounds, increasing the likelihood that they will never reach them.
You can do your part to help keep migrating birds safe by turning out your outdoor lights between 11:00 PM and 6:00 AM from now through the end of May. You also can install motion sensors on your lights, so they come on only when they are needed.
You can also help birds by minimizing outdoor lights throughout the year. Scientific studies are making it increasingly clear that lights at night disturb birds’ sleep, causing them to lose weight, lay fewer eggs and have fewer baby birds that survive to leave the nest.
Would you like to learn more about the effect of outdoor lights on birds? Join us for an online program about the importance of reducing outdoor lighting. Our speakers will be Joelle Gehring, the Acting Assistant Regional Director for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Migratory Bird Program, and Jo Anna Lutmerding, a Biologist in the US Fish & Wildlife Service’s Migratory Bird Program. Joelle and Joanne are the co-leaders of the Bird Collision Prevention Alliance, a coalition of over 100 organizations (including NVBA) who are committed to making our built environment safer for birds. You can register for this free program here.