Music and Cats

One of the first sounds that I heard this morning was the chirping of birds in the trees around our house. There must’ve been hundreds of them; I could hear not only a symphony of calls, but a continuous rustling as they moved, unseen, among the tree branches. I carried Sasha to an open window, his furry body tense in my arms. He could hear the birds, but could not see them. It seems that cackling is a response to visual stimuli; Sasha, though focused on the sound of the birds, was silent.

Busy with my morning routine, I did not see or hear the birds leave. On other fall mornings, however, I have seen small whirlwinds erupt from our trees, then morph into an undulating flock of small winged bodies, heading south. The fall migration will soon be in full wing.

There are many dangers, both natural and manmade, faced by migrating birds. One of those dangers is the nighttime lighting of tall buildings in major metropolitan areas such as Chicago and New York City. The lights disrupt the navigation systems of migrating birds; many birds die when they crash into skyscraper windows.

For the past several years, a program called Lights Out Chicago has encouraged the property managers and tenants of tall buildings to turn off exterior building lights on the upper floors of tall buildings, and to dim interior lights or close the blinds in offices above the fortieth floor, from 11 p.m. to dawn during peak migratory seasons. The Audubon Society estimates that Chicago’s light-cutting program saves the lives of over 10,000 migratory birds each year. (The Society’s web site has striking photos of the Chicago skyline before and after 11 p.m. on a fall night.)

Today, New York City officials and wildlife advocates launched a new Lights Out New York initiative:

The new program is part of New York City Audubon’s Project Safe Flight, which has documented about 4,000 birds killed or injured by building collisions in New York since 1997. Its survey listed about 100 different species as victims, the most common being the white-throated sparrow, the yellowthroat and the dark-eyed junco — but not the rock dove, the ubiquitous city pigeon.

Three injured birds, including a feisty red-tailed hawk that lost its left eye, were displayed during the news conference.

The appeal is directed at owners of buildings 40 stories or taller, and low buildings along the Hudson and East rivers with extensive glass exteriors. They are asked to turn off nonessential lighting on upper stories of taller buildings and on the exteriors of lower ones, from midnight until daylight in September and October.

“We’re really trying to do this in the peak of migration,” but it is not limited to that period, said E.J. McAdams, executive director of NYC Audubon. The spring phase of the program will likely start in mid-March and last about two months.

Parks Department Commissioner Adrian Benepe said the development of suburban areas has caused city parks to take on a greater role “as oases … where birds stop off to find shelter, to drink water and to eat food.”

The Empire State Building already turns off its lights at midnight, in part because of the number of birds that once crashed into its upper floors. (I imagine those lights blinking off is one way that some New Yorkers tell the time.) I hope that the many other NYC buildings over forty stories will shut off their lights, too, if only for a couple of months each year. Who knows? If enough buildings were to go dark at night, New Yorkers might even see a star or two that they don’t see now. They’ll certainly see fewer small feathered bodies on the sidewalks in the morning.

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