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Looking for an easy way to take care of your bird friends this migration season? Did you know each year during spring migration many birds that are navigating the night sky become disoriented from artificial building lighting? Not only does city lighting deter the navigational abilities of migrating birds, but it also leads to an increase in fatal building collisions, killing an estimated 1 billion birds annually.
Play a part in helping birds survive and thrive this season by:
- Making your windows safer by installing screens and breaking up reflections.
- Diming or turn off nonessential lights. Exterior security lighting is more bird friendly when directed downward rather than into the sky.
- Enjoying birds while helping science and conservation! Your observations will provide valuable information to show where birds are thriving or declining. Take part in the Third Breeding Bird Atlas.
New York State is also committed to helping a variety of bird species during the busy migration season to reduce bird collisions. To do our part, state-owned and operated buildings will participate in the Lights Out Initiative and turn off all non-essential lighting from 11:00 p.m. to dawn during peak bird migrations in the spring and fall.
Photo at top: Gray catbird. Photo by Jeffrey Werner, provided by the NYS DEC.
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I would love to see my neighbors lites turned out all nite, lions and tigers and bears OH MY.
That and the push by environmental lobby groups to force excessively bright LED lights on us. If it’s cheap to power 1 LED light why not add 6 more to the house and leave them on all night? Its having a huge negative effect on birds and insects. Unintended consequences by environmentalist that do zero research that may go against their narrative.
I don’t know where you are getting your info, but it is nonsense. Try a little critical thinking before you regurgitate this trash.
Feel the love Dana!
Instead of talking trash try pulling your head out of the sand and do some research.
Sorry – you don’t get off that easy. If you spew nonsense, be able to back it up. If you can’t back up extraordinary statements, don’t post them. If you want people to take you seriously, you should be prepared to back up your statements with facts. If you can’t, then post it as opinion and not fact. I can’t find an “environmental group” that suggests adding more overall lighting to add to light pollution. That seems to be your narrative.
I agree that environmental groups suggest replacing old lighting with more energy efficient LEDS where practical, but if consumers take the initiative to foolishly add more candlepower to the night skies, it is on the INDIVIDUAL or private entity, not environmental groups. Lighting is often suggested to reduce the risk of crime and add security, but that is law enforcement and lighting industry push, not an environmental priority. Environmental groups have been instrumental in helping to design outdoor lighting that shines downward and not into the sky, auto-off lighting, etc.. They have also been instrumental in focusing attention on bird/bat migration mortality due to lighting concerns on all sorts of structures.
Indeed, if there ARE groups out there suggesting lighting up the night sky, they certainly wouldn’t be an environmental group and would be the exception, not the rule. Attack THOSE outlier groups specifically, not the environmental lobby in general.
Sorry, you’re wrong. Pointing white LED lights up will negatively effect birds. Pointing them down negatively effects insects. Those impacts where never exposed. I’m not going to post links to reports / research for you and walk you through them. It IS the environmental lobby! There’s plenty of kickbacks for politicians and lobbyists. But you can just keep your head in the sand.
There are many types of LED lighting. However, if you are narrowing the argument to what the downsides of certain outdoor lighting involves, that is another issue – an issue that environmentalists are also addressing and helping to fund research. But environmentalists are not forcing anyone to use more nighttime lighting.
Pointing lights down does affect a great deal of wildlife, but so does light shining in any direction. But shrouding and minimizing lighting does help with birds and bats and other migratory species – the point of the article. It also helps with overall light pollution which has its own effects on wildlife. Who do you think funds and carries out this wildlife research? Bankers? Lawyers? Politicians? Environmental groups and scientists. There are many types of environmental lobby groups with a multitude of agendas and attempting to lump them all together is simply not going to prove your point. If you don’t wish to name who you see as “offenders”, that is fine – but should you be painting environmentalism in general with such a wide brush? It seems you have a great deal of environmental ethics, so why condemn the “environmental lobby” as a whole?
So called green companies are more than happy to fund and donate to universities for research that will favor their latest products that will somehow benefit the environment and wildlife. Of course, a law will then have to be passed to make us all purchase and use them. EVs, LED lights, covering millions of acres with solar panels that are built by government funded contractors, banning other competitors products, and so on. All this is supposed to save the environment. No, environmentalists are not forcing anyone to use more lighting, but they are responsible for it. They are the ones who will destroy this planet with misguided intentions. Strip mining Africa and the rain forest for cobalt and lithium sure is going to save us all. I question the validity and impartiality of the scientific evidence that supports such drastic measures that have hidden costs and consequences that are ignored or downplayed by the green lobby and environmentalists. Shame on them all and the people who support them.
“They are the ones who will destroy this planet with misguided intentions.”
Your whole statement is spot on Mike except I would ammend the above portion somewhat. It’s only misguided for the people that just nod their heads and go along. The ones that are running the scam know exactly what they’re doing. After all, it’s been their plan all along.
“They are the ones who will destroy this planet with misguided intentions.”
Your whole statement is spot on Mike except I would ammend the above portion somewhat. It’s only misguided for the people that just nod their heads and go along. The ones that are running the scam know exactly what they’re doing. After all, it’s been their plan all along.
Mike says: “That and the push by environmental lobby groups to force excessively bright LED lights on us…..Its having a huge negative effect on birds and insects. Unintended consequences by environmentalist that do zero research that may go against their narrative.”
You’re right about this Mike! Where I used to live the city put up LED lights in place of the old lamps in the library lot, and though those lights are facing down, boy are they bright and is the neighborhood aglow come nighttime. It’s like daylight 24/7 in that neighborhood now; and too….birds come out earlier, they fly from tree to tree, some of them going down to the ground to catch insects hours before daylight arrives; and too often wild cats are lying low in the dark waiting for a good meal and not uncommon a sight was a heap, or a line, of feathers along the ground where those cats were successful. We do more damage then we realize oftentimes while convinced we’re doing good, even the environmentalists!
Regards the environmental lobby groups who aren’t perfect by far….think about the big corporations who lobby for their causes, which are wholly “for profit.” We’re in a no win sort of predicament seems to me.
Dana says: “I don’t know where you are getting your info, but it is nonsense.”
It’s not nonsense! There’s a large air of truth to what Mike says.
I’m reading further on here and I see Mike is up against a torrent. I’m here to say that what he says is not trash! My neighborhood went from semi-dark nights with the old fluorescent way of lighting it up, to a neighborhood saturated with brightness due to the new LEDS the city installed. Getting a good glimpse of the stars at night was problem enough with the old lights, but when they installed those LED’s….the heavens lost much more of their glitter unfortunately, which is the least of the ill effects of LEDs. There’s the birds and the insects, as Mike says, which by far lose out more than my longing for extraterrestrial wonders.
Charlie,
My main point was it was not environmental groups or lobbies that were pushing for increased night lighting. Just the opposite. Light pollution weighs heavily on the environmental agenda. Environmentalists may have pushed for more efficient lighting to decrease electrical lighting waste, but certainly NOT to increase the amount of nighttime lighting adding to light pollution. If other groups push for increase lighting for reasons of security and safety, they need to be aware of the environmental pitfalls.
Dana says: “if consumers take the initiative to foolishly add more candlepower to the night skies, it is on the INDIVIDUAL or private entity, not environmental groups. Lighting is often suggested to reduce the risk of crime and add security, but that is law enforcement and lighting industry push, not an environmental priority.”
It goes both ways Dana, but yes you are right in what you say for sure. People move up from the urban areas too often and abhor darkness so they push for more light at nights due to their insecurities. If there was but even a marked absence of desire in much much more of us, for any ‘thing’, plastic, you name it; if we were but able to be rid of the darkness (no pun intended) which envelops our tortured souls, maybe then we’d start seeing some real progress towards checking the mass extinction which is taking place right in front of our eyes which we see not, and which, by the way, LED lights is adding to, even if in incremental ways compared to the rest.
Charlie S.,
Most people agree LED lighting has drawbacks – and one of them is unnatural spectral output. Most of the early LED lights were bright white to human eyes. Further development has helped with massaging the spectral output to be more comfortable and natural with fewer shorter-wavelength (blues-UV) emissions. Large-scale commercial and municipal lighting projects eager to embrace the new technology purchased what was available at the time, as did I in my own home. But it was easy for me to replace my 1st generation LED bulbs with more natural colors when they became available and as the price dropped. But the large-scale players have a tougher time justifying the expense of switching to newer bulbs as long as the old ones are working fine. But to me, if LED lighting has a significant effect on lowering energy costs, I believe we should stay with it and improve it until there is a better option.
As you mention, the current mass-extinction episode is in-progress and needs to factor in our daily lives, as we will will certainly share the same fate. It is human nature that needs to adapt to a changing world – even if we take one step back for every two-steps forward. We just ain’t that smart…