‘No one wants a building that kills birds’: why cities are turning off the lights | Environment

R.The legs of the WRN were accurately tucked under his small body, and they retreated on its side as if it were asleep. If he is not lying on the bare concrete of Texas Street, there will be few clues that endured violent death.

The bird was first transferred to the Bank of America, which is a 72 -storey new skyscraper in the heart of Dallas. Her body was indexed by volunteers who seek to document the number of birds that hit mineral and metal structures and concrete covered with confusing lights that form our cities.

that it estimated About a billion birds dies throughout the United States every year in this way, one of the main drivers of a worrying stagnation in numbers. For dozens of volunteers who gathered before dawn to search for the city center for newly dead birds on May morning, each of these losses is an official one.

Tim Price, Director of Community Participation at the Beirut Museum for Nature, Science and Plain Puritus, says The lights come out, Texas! campaign. “It is horrific to believe that these birds have flew all the way through the Gulf of Mexico only to travel to the first glass building.”

Dallas buildings, along with other Texas cities, are particularly fatal obstacles because they are sitting in the central corridor, a major migration path that birds eat while passing North and South America. It is believed that one in three birds migrate across the United States every spring that passes through Texas.

“This is a lot of birds,” said Price. The lights polls take the morning charges three times a week during the peak spring migration season – last year 295 fathers were registered. The volunteers have collected and tagged more than 100 species since 2020, including birds, doves, pipers, oven birds, and unusual discoveries such as flags or wood, which are usually found in the swamps.

But there is no way to calculate such deaths completely, as Price admits, because the birds are flowing regularly to office towers, homes and energy lines, and,,, and,, less Despite some claims, wind turbines. Cheap Capeer – Both the murdered flying birds may constitute up to six nests in the season, with up to six eggs in each nest. “So the loss of one bird is 340 birds or so in two years,” says Price.

For birds that travel from forests or dark herbal lands, sudden reporting of the lights and walls of the glass in cities can be a trap with death. On the maps that paint us light pollution, Dallas is a burning beacon, lights up and out of its buildings in the sky instead of focusing on the place you need. Most birds are Lilin immigrants, and those with reconciliation to move by moon and stars, and the artificial alternatives of these ponds, in addition to the reflections in the glass, especially the nearby trees that aim to birds, many caused them to become unwanted and collide with buildings.

“We had a security guard telling us that birds collide with glass because they are affected by stupidity,” says Price. And I said well, imagine trying to run through a mirror maze at a speed of 35 miles per hour, to what extent do you think you will get it? “If you don’t see the glass before, how many people you think they had entered a door or a glass window?”

Photo pollution has been present since the invention of Lightbulb, but in the past twenty years, the strict and intrusive light began to block stars and wrong birds that fly at night, according to Teznie PGH, director of McDonald Observatory at the University of Texas. “It has become a source of great concern,” says Bug. “Each generation, we basically raise the number of stars that you can see at night.”

On the global level, light pollution has increased by 10 % annually since 2011, a study It was released in 2023. But there was some progress by rethinking excessive lighting, which is often expensive and harmful, and the progress of birds of birds, which merges points or lines to warn birds from an imminent obstacle.

Cities such as Houston and New York have pledged to reduce bird strikes, with the latter changing The annual greeting in the events of September 11, where a double shaft of light is thrown towards the sky, by turning off the lights for a short period if more than 1,000 birds are surrounded, surrounded, in its symptoms.

McCromic Place in Chicago, the largest conference center in North America, has become notorious when it is 1000 birds Criticize One night in 2023. “This building is a real killer,” says Adrian Duker, an environmentalist at the Cornell Bird Science Laboratory. But the center has since installed a safe glass to birds, cutting the amount of accidents by about 90 % last year.

In Dallas, Reunion Tower, a giant golf teacher on a stick, weakened its lights during the peak migration season in the spring, and activists accumulated pressure on the city’s conference center to take action as well. The sprawling building contains a lot of dark glass on the height of birds of birds, located near tree holders. The center is subject to the renovation of the volunteers from the spotlight in order to install a safe glass of birds.

Mei Ling Liu, a light -sighted organizer Texas Conservation Alliance.

Progress is complex due to the inherent construction and lighting habits, which are exacerbated by LED lights, which are worse for birds and insects but are cheaper and more efficient. Glass is more likely for birds than standard versions. “It is a challenge,” Leo adds. “When it comes to light pollution, it is not a single building problem, it is an entire city. Dallas are still very bright.”

When Dallas begins to get out of her slumber, volunteers who wear her wearers continue to find birds on their circle. One of the two wars is discovered at the ground at the foot of a hotel – it is placed in a brown bag to be sent to the rehabilitation center. A young man, dead, is not very lucky, just as another bird, a full war, is so much that Leo should pick it up with a force and vibrate because it is covered with ants.

In general, 12 dead birds are recovered, placed in bags, registering and putting them in the freezer in Beirut MuseumThat installed a safe glass for birds after some windows were destroyed amid Black Lives Matter’s protests in 2020.

Bird migration peaks at night

A type of silent spring wraps birds, with three billion less birds in North America From what it was in the seventiesA loss called by the researchers “amazing”. About a third of the types of birds In need of critical preservation proceduresAs numbers are faster in places Where they are more abundant. “The most severe declines in these strong and wonderful strong areas,” Duker says. “We see the birds disappear at a rate, environmentally, very fast.”

the Ballow eagle and California Condor Perhaps it was rescued from the edge of extinction, but, on a larger scale, the days are distinguished after a number of birds. Passengers, which were coming out of the sun, are eliminated once until the sun was eliminated while flying, completely.

Our world has fewer songs, less colors and a feeling diminishing wonder as a result. There is a large group of reasons behind this rural crisis – habitat loss, chemical use and climate crisis among them – but the most solution crisis is the tragedy of birds that collide with buildings.

“The beautiful thing about this problem is that it is within our reach to change quickly, it is not similar to climate change or plastic pollution.” “The designs of safe windows from birds are the future and more cities achieve lighting problems. We can all influence this, even in our homes. We can address this problem.”