A new avian-friendly program aimed at protecting bird local populations during their spring migratory period is taking off in Philadelphia with the hopes of being applied elsewhere in order to combat a mostly invisible problem impacting the ecological systems surrounding major cities across the world.
The Philadelphia Inquirer recently published an interesting look at the success of the Lights Out Philly initiative, which encourages building owners, businesses, and individuals to turn off or reduce unnecessary lighting, especially during peak migration periods, minimizing light pollution and allowing migrating birds to navigate more safely. The program has shown a 70% decrease in the number of bird deaths caused by accidental collisions with buildings in the Center City area since being inaugurated in April of 2021.
Lights Out Philly is managed under the larger umbrella of Bird Safe Philly, a consortium of interest groups that includes the National Audubon Society and Drexel University’s Academy of Natural Sciences, among others.
“We’ve had such a robust response to this and such great participation from our members that it just makes sense,” local building manager Kiphorn told the paper. “And it’s the right thing to do. It makes sense to help preserve the bird population. It’s also environmentally friendly.”
As part of the program, participating buildings in the city shut off or drastically reduce the number of lights used from April 1st to May 31st and again from August 15th to November 15th. Philadelphia lies within the major Atlantic Flyway route and therefore serves as a bellwether for the Lights Out program, which currently includes participation from 45 cities and 7 different states and regions.
“If we can continue monitoring for a couple of years and we see that this reduction continues, then we have more confidence that it’s the lights, and not anything else,” Keith Russell, a program manager with Audubon Mid-Atlantic, told the local PBS affiliate finally.
More information about the Lights Out program can be found here.
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