Bright lights, big city, bashed birds

How turning down the lights can save hundreds of millions of birds annually while helping to prevent climate change

Kirk Weinert
The Public Interest Network
4 min readMay 20, 2019

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Photo: David Mark from Pixabay

“Bright lights, big city, gone to my baby’s head…
Go ahead, pretty baby, a-honey, knock yourself out…”
“Bright Lights, Big City” by Jimmy Reed and Mama Reed (1961)

When Chicago bluesman Jimmy Reed and his wife wrote the lyrics to his greatest hit, one of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s 500 songs that most shaped the genre, they weren’t thinking about migratory birds.

But as several new studies have detailed, they unwittingly described one of Sweet Home Chicago’s saddest environmental problems — one for which, to its dismay, it leads the country: Bird death-by-building.

For the past hundred years or so, we humans have been drawn to the bright lights of the big city.

So too have cuckoos, warblers, orioles and other birds that migrate at night.

The invention of the electric light bulb has been mostly positive for you and me. But it has become a fatal attraction for our feathered friends.

Like moths to a flame, many birds follow the glow of an office building window to their doom. Indirectly, lights are responsible for many of the hundreds of millions of birds killed by flying into buildings each year.

Nighttime lighting can also throw off birds’ internal clocks, disrupting their morning songs, their mating rituals and even their ability to reproduce.

Such life and death threats are not only horrific, but preventable.

We simply need to turn down the lights.

Thanks in part to a fascinating case study, we know this approach works. On September 11th from 2010–2016, researchers tracked birds flying near the high-powered light beams that memorialize the former Twin Towers site in lower Manhattan on the anniversary of 9/11. They found that the beams caused millions of birds to “aimlessly loop and chirp incessantly.” When the beams were turned off, the number of circling birds dropped by 97 percent.

Many cities have programs to encourage building owners to turn down the lights voluntarily. That’s nice, but there’s enormous room for improvement.

Take Chicago, through which millions of songbirds migrate each year.

It’s had a voluntary program for 24 years, which it says saves 10,000 birds annually. Yet, according to a new study, Chicago has the worst lighting problem of any major city in the United States, followed by Houston and Dallas. The Chicago Tribune says it’s “the most dangerous metropolitan area in the contiguous U.S. for migratory birds.”

As the director of Chicago Bird Collision Monitors recently lamented, “It’s unfortunate that the birds we find here in the spring have made it all the way from South America, almost to their nesting grounds in Wisconsin, and they hit a window.”

Chicago is particularly dangerous for birds that call out to each other when migrating. A new study of 70,000 dead songbirds in Chicago and Cleveland found that such “super collider” species are attracted to bright buildings and tragically call nearby birds to join them.

Educating building owners and designers has made only a small dent in the avian fatality rate, and we can’t expect birds to change millions of years of evolved behavior overnight.

It’s time for us humans to take the next step.

That step has to be taken in our cities, where most decisions about building codes, zoning and lighting have traditionally been made.

Several proposals out there could make a real difference.

One is the “Model Lighting Ordinance” developed by the Illuminating Engineering Society and the International Dark Sky Association. It is a compendium of land-use concepts, such as “lighting zones” (different amounts of outdoor lighting allowed for particular areas), “light curfews,” and reducing “uplighting” (think streetlights that unnecessarily illuminate the sky above).

Another is the “Bird Friendly Design Ordinance.” Versions of this have been passed in several cities and are being debated in Chicago this year. Among the provisions of the Chicago proposal are:

  • Non-essential outdoor lighting must automatically shut off between 11pm and sunrise.
  • No more than 5 percent of a building’s facade, up to 36 feet, can be glass, unless it is “bird-safe glass” with etchings, frosting or screens.
  • Indoor plants and lighting that are attractive to birds and visible from the outside must be behind bird-friendly glass.

By passing those ordinances or parts of them, Chicago will be able to save millions of birds and set a shining example for the rest of the country’s cities, large and small.

As a bonus, people who implement these plans will reduce electricity use, reduce global warming emissions and save money.

Such guidelines will also create momentum for the federal Bird-Safe Buildings Act (H.R. 919), which would require new federal buildings to be “bird-friendly.” That bill already has a bipartisan set of sponsors, including Chicago’s Mike Quigley.

Without a society-wide commitment to change, this problem is only going to get worse. The human race seems hard-wired to want its environs lighted on demand. We’re not going to tame fear of the dark any time soon.

I just hope that, a hundred years from now — or even a decade ahead — we won’t be like the “pretty baby” of Jimmy Reed’s song, to whom he ruefully explains:

“Whoa, it’s all right, pretty baby, gonna need my help someday
Ya’ gonna wish you had a-listened, to some a-those things I said”

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