For the Birds Radio Program: FLAP
In Toronto, people are trying to protect birds from colliding with buildings at night.
Transcript
Migration is the most dangerous time in a bird’s life. Tiny tropical birds must cover thousands of miles through unfamiliar, often inhospitable territory. They migrate at nighttime, navigating by the stars, and when they come down in the morning, they have to find food wherever they happen to be. This works great if they end up in or near appropriate habitat, but more and more in this increasingly crowded and urbanized world, they find themselves in the middle of a city.
Fortunately, small songbirds are resourceful creatures who are surprisingly intelligent and adaptable. When I took ornithology classes in the mid-70s, the accepted wisdom was that such tiny birds that rely so heavily on instinct to begin migration and get their directions must do everything by instinct, and must therefore be less intelligent than birds without so many innate behaviors. But more and more, ornithologists are appreciating the intelligence of many small birds. As a rehabilitator, I’ve long thought they were smarter than people gave them credit for.
But even if warblers and sparrows are smarter than we once thought, they are still governed by a bird brain. Certain stimuli automatically trigger certain responses, even if those responses aren’t logical or safe in a modern world.
One of the greatest hazards that birds face in migration comes from nocturnal navigation. Over past centuries and millennia, this has proven to be an excellent system when everything’s going right. The trick is that when something isn’t going right, it can go very wrong. Warblers evolved to live on a planet that has a definite day and night, but streetlights, neon signs, the flashing lights at antenna farms, and other artificial lighting obscure the star patterns even on clear nights. And worse, these artificial lights actually lure birds to them, like moths to a candle.
Every year millions of birds die at lighted antenna towers and buildings. The flashing red lights on antennas and the tops of skyscrapers are essential for aircraft pilots to notice these hazards in their airspace, but most of the collisions with buildings are much lower, at lighted windows. And most ironically, in the middle of the night when the most birds are migrating, few of the lights in office buildings are actually illuminating anything for people—many of them are simply on because people neglected to turn the lights off when they left work for the day.
A group of bird lovers in Toronto, Ontario, got sick of seeing all the dead and injured birds and decided to do something about it. They started the Fatal Light Awareness Program, or FLAP, to educate business people to turn off their lights or draw shades or blinds at night during migration. Frankly, this seems wise on other fronts, too—electric lights do cost money to run after all. FLAP volunteers also comb the streets of downtown Toronto early each morning during migration to pick up the carcasses and injured birds. More than 50 percent are dead or dying, but almost half survive thanks to them. Without intervention, scavengers such as crows, cats, raccoons, and foxes pick them up. Even the dead ones are useful—they help document the problem so people realize just how dangerous lighted buildings are.
Right now birds are migrating through our area. If you live or work in a tall building, see what you can do by asking your building manager to encourage lights out. It saves energy, and it saves birds.