The buildings participating in Lights Out Philly include the Comcast towers, BNY Mellon Center, the Liberty Place building and 12 other building operators or owners, according to the Inquirer.
Researchers estimate that between 365 million and one billion birds are killed by collisions with buildings each year, according to the AP. Mirror-like windows can also cause problems by presenting a false picture of the bird’s path ahead, perhaps reflecting sky or trees where there is only a pane of glass. On cloudy nights, the glow of urban centers becomes even more confusing because birds can’t see the sky. Per the AP, birds become disoriented by artificial light because at night they use the stars and moon to navigate. “We have specimens in the academy’s ornithology collection from a kill that happened when lights were first installed on Philadelphia’s City Hall tower in 1896,” Jason Weckstein, associate curator of ornithology at Drexel University’s Academy of Natural Sciences, tells the AP. The mass-collision event last October may have been the largest in 70 years, reports Shawn Marsh for the Associated Press (AP), but the issue of city lights causing bird deaths is anything but new. Now, spurred in part by the Inquirer’s coverage, some of the city’s most prominent skyscrapers are going to be turning their lights off after dark as part of a voluntary initiative called Lights Out Philly aimed at helping migrating birds pass through the city safely, Kummer reports for the Inquirer. An estimated 1,000 to 1,500 birds died in a roughly three-block radius located in downtown Philadelphia on a single Friday night, Frank Kummer of the Philadelphia Inquirer reported at the time. The issue came to a head on a cloudy night last October. But as these avian odysseys weave through the city’s twinkling lights, the skyline’s sparkle can cause a significant number of birds to become disoriented, leading them to smash into windows or the sides of buildings and, ultimately, litter the sidewalks with their feathered corpses. Every spring and fall, millions of migrating birds pass through Philadelphia, with the majority of these flights taking place at night.
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