Every night during the spring and fall migration seasons, thousands of birds are killed when they crash into illuminated windows, disoriented by the light. But a new study in PNAS shows that darkening just half of a building’s windows can make a big difference for birds. Using decades’ worth of data and birds collected by Field Museum scientists at Chicago’s McCormick Place convention center, the researchers found that on nights when half the windows were darkened, there were 11 times fewer bird collisions during spring migration and 6 times fewer collisions during fall migration than when all the windows were lit.
“Our research provides the best evidence yet that migrating birds are attracted to building lights, often causing them to collide with windows and die,” says Benjamin Van Doren, a postdoctoral associate at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the paper’s lead author. “These insights were only possible thanks to over 40 years of work by David Willard at the Field Museum, who led collisions and light monitoring efforts.”
In 1978, Willard, the museum’s collections manager emeritus, heard an offhand remark about birds hitting the McCormick Place, North America’s largest convention center that happens to be just a mile south of the museum. So, he investigated. [Read more…] about Turning off lights can save migrating birds from crashing into buildings
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