Posted on 09/22/2022 3:36:23 PM PDT by Right Wing Vegan
Every spring and fall, billions of birds migrate through the US, mostly under the cover of darkness. This mass movement of birds must contend with a dramatically increasing but still largely unrecognized threat: light pollution. Light pollution harms birds, but you can help!
Light attracts and disorients migrating birds, confusing and exhausting them as well as making them vulnerable to collisions with buildings, not to mention other urban threats like cats and toxins. An estimated 365 – 988 million birds die in collisions with buildings annually, including a number of species of high conservation concern. The BirdCast team joins a growing international Lights Out efforts already underway, including in over 30 cities in North America, in proposing and implementing one solution that is as simple as flipping a switch. In conjunction with primary measures to make buildings and homes, especially their windows, more bird friendly (check out this comprehensive resource for preventing window collisions) during daylight hours, lights out campaigns offer a critically important opportunity to reduce and to eliminate an enormous contributing source of nocturnal and diurnal hazards.
Why are birds important?
Birds provide:
ecosystem services, act as benchmarks for environmental health, increase livability, and connect people of all ages and abilities to the natural world.
The solution:
Turn off or dim non-essential lighting during critical migration periods! Turning off lights dramatically reduces hazards from attraction to and disorientation by light, allowing birds to safely proceed with their migratory journeys. And further, Lights Out does more than save birds, it saves energy and money! The Environmental Protection Agency highlights energy as the largest operating expense for commercial buildings. Reducing energy use by shutting off lights for migration season makes environmental sense and fiscal sense.
Lights Out is a win-win for birds and cities, and the people who love both. By working together toward a dark sky every spring and fall, we will keep birds safely on course and out of harm’s way. Each light matters, and your commitment makes all the difference.
This fall, take the pledge to let us know you’re going Lights Out during critical migration periods to protect wildlife in your area!
Take action using these guidelines:
Light-Guidelines
Turn off non-essential lights from 11 PM until 6 AM during critical migration periods. Turn off or dim lobby and atrium lights. Turn off or dim interior home lighting, or draw blinds to prevent light escaping. Turn off decorative landscape lighting. Turn off lights before leaving the home or office. Be sure outside lights are aimed down and well shielded. Install motion sensors on outside lights to minimize use. Prevent daylight collisions with bird friendly products for windows
A certain small village I lived in many decades ago had a bunch of relatively rich Californians move in - they sold their homes, like Al Bundy’s ranch home, for a then unheard of valuation o $400K. home there were in the $20 to $30K region.
Naturally, the town council bowed to their every whim, until they demanded that the town lights, out to the limits, be turned off so they could see the stars.
I remember this well because I was looking to buy a home on the water then so I could build a boat house for my commercial fishing boat. The one I was looking at was going for 35K - a lot then. But one of the yahoos walked into the real estate office while I was there and offered $250K cash for that home.
They wanted to experience the country life and raise Alpacas - they just gushed all over the agent - the gush was strong in them or maybe it was smarminess, but they definitely considered themselves in the upper elite and wanted every one to know it.
Lights around the clock can affect plants as well.
We have the Dark Sky program in my town thanks to our proximity to Tucson and their high-tech telescopes. We have no street lights in our developments as it is, and now these idiots want us to stumble around in the dark outside? I think not.
They've done a good job eliminating and washing out our once beautiful night skies. In LA, with zillions of street lights one every 70 feet, the night skies are all washed out...In fact the light dome over S.CA can be seen as a far away as Las Vegas.
It's ironic, they'll tell ya lights make big cities safer, yet the big cities like LA are lit up like prison yards or stadiums, and the crime is through the roof and getting worse..
If lights made you safe, Las Vegas and LA should be the safest places on earth.☺
Behind Tokyo...
The more lights they install, the higher the crime. LA is lit up like a gigantic San Quintin. In most of the LA area you can drive with your headlights off and see perfectly well, on moonless nights even.
Virginia is ahead of the curve here. VDOT hates street lighting so much that they didn’t even bother to install any for the I66/I81 interchange. And few of the lights for the overhead signs in the state still work, though I drove through the I95/route 3 interchange at night and noticed that the lighting on those signs, which are only a couple years old, is working.
Hmmm, I seem to have missed the effects of all those “sustainable power” windmills out there. You know, the things that make noise, will cause massive disposal problems, and - almost forgot - kill thousands of birds.
Please contribute to “Guillotines for Gullible Leftists”.
We have so many to build and so little time.
Tokyo makes LA look like a quarter moon over the desert. Yet Tokyo’s crime rate is a minuscule fraction of LA’s. The obvious solution is to turn off every light in LA.
Newsom is working on it as we type...
Maybe I should clairify, Being a native, I consider LA or the LA area to be from the Santa Monica Mountains to the Valley, south to Orange County and eastward to Pomona out to San Bernardino. It’s about 100 miles of solid concrete, structures, freeways, buildings and street lights. I don’t think the Tokyo area could match that scene from an aircraft’s point of view. It’s a vast expanse of lights. Look at a map.
Naw, the obvious solution is to do what the Democrats do, install a few hundred thousands more street lights and jack up the taxes more.
I can get on board with this, can’t even see the stars out in the country anymore.
At least put some sort of reflector to reduce radiation to space and focus lights down.
LEDs made lights cheap and they have proliferated.
You too can live under stadium lights! It's all to protect you!
In a few years they’ll be using this as an excuse to stop nighttime driving.
Does not seem like hysteria. It’s also fact based.
Maybe a pretext for a power hungry bureaucrat, but I don’t see any mention or suggestion of forced compliance for lights out.
LOL! Doubtful, not many species except owls will fly at the height of a car at night.
There is an organization called the International Dark Sky Organization that strives to make the skies darker for astronomy by trying to educate communities about how wasteful the high-powered lighting used at night is in terms of unnecessary energy used, dollars spent on electricity, and the judicious use of shielding on outside lights.
They mean well. Being an amateur astronomer myself, I can see a need for education showing that there are cheaper ways of lighting our communities and still having the necessary lighting needed for security. And boy, do we ever need security! Now, more than ever.
I don’t want to see our night skies get washed out with excess light any more than they do. Like I said, they mean well, but like any other movement, there are a few who go too far, thinking of their own interests ahead of anyone else’s.
There actually are “dark sky” communities in the Southwest designed for astronomy, where everyone shuts their lights off at night.
Those people who want to live under those kind of skies, if they have that kind of money to spend, should move to those places, instead of moving into a community and start making demands.
I wish I could do that.
As for the birds, they’re not going to become extinct no matter what we do…
🔭🔭🔭
I’ve seen both from the air.
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