Mike Quigley (D-Ill.) introduced a bill in Mayto require all federal buildings to meet “bird friendly” standards (two previous efforts went nowhere). No similar proposals have been floated in the District or Baltimore city councils. “But the effort to publicize with Lights Out is helping change that.” San Francisco, Oakland, Minneapolis and Toronto have passed legislation mandating lights out in commercial buildings and/or requiring “bird-friendly” construction of new buildings. “Most people are oblivious to the impact lights have on birds,” Schmidt says. Their collections are affecting not only research but also policy. It is possible that the collections could help scientists document changing migration patterns and threats to specific species: Although Lights Out folks in the District and Baltimore have never found dead birds on the endangered species list, they regularly collect 12 types on the “species of greatest conservation need” list. Topping the list are the black-throated blue warbler, the ruby-throated hummingbird, the golden-winged warbler and the brown creeper. With the help of Lights Out volunteers, scientists now know the 25 bird species most vulnerable to window strikes. “But we’ve had no way of measuring that until now, with observers out there collecting and counting.” “I don’t know that the numbers of migrating birds dying from lights and disorientation have necessarily increased in the last decade,” says Smithsonian bird specialist Schmidt. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)Ĭlearly more research is needed. Jacks is coordinator of the Baltimore chapters of Lights Out and a penguin keeper at the Baltimore Zoo.
#Lights out 9 live feed full#
Lindsay Jacks delivered a cooler full of birds collected by Lights Out Baltimore to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. During fall 1970, 707 dead birds were found below the Empire State Building alone. The highest number of deaths occurs from window strikes. Though hard numbers are difficult to come by, a 2005 USDA Forest Service report estimated that 500 million to 1 billion birds are killed annually nationwide because of collisions with buildings, communication towers, power lines and other man-made objects. Drawn to the light, they descend and become trapped in the urban maze, unable to distinguish between street lamps and stars, real light and reflected light, bona fide trees and mirrored images of trees in windows. Migrating birds, who use the moon, stars and electromagnetic fields to help them navigate their journeys, become disoriented by the bright steel and glass structures below them.
The birds provide material for the 300 or so researchers who visit every year to study migration habits, global warming, bird-plane collisions, environmental hazards, disease and, of special interest to the Lights Out communities, the damage done by the sirenlike lights that surround our city centers. There, ornithologists preserve the bodies and add many of them to the institution’s collection of 600,000 dead birds. Members of Lights Out Baltimore and Lights Out DC cap each spring and fall migration season by taking their frozen birds and inventory lists to the Smithsonian. They walk the same route each morning it is a routine echoed in cities across North America: Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Toronto, Washington.
She and fellow volunteers such as librarian Lynne Parks are part of a growing micro-movement to effect environmental change, one dead bird at a time.
#Lights out 9 live feed windows#
She is also a member of Lights Out Baltimore, an organization, started in 2008, that scours the streets in the predawn hours to collect birds - dead or stunned - that have collided with windows in the city’s corporate canyons. Jacks is a bird keeper at the Maryland Zoo in Baltimore (the bar-code tattoo honors her favorite charge, Penguin No. “That way,” he says, indicating that Jacks should sign in for her meeting with Brian Schmidt, the museum specialist who will accept her offering. “What’s in the cooler?” the security guard asks.Ĭurt nod. The 30-year-old bird lover has a penguin-related tattoo on her arm, a cooler in her hand and a Safeway bag knocking against her leg. Lindsay Jacks shows up at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History a day before the federal shutdown.
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