Autumn Lights Out Alerts — Do Your Part to Help Birds Migrate Safely

September 9, 2024—Songbirds are migrating south through Connecticut, so now is a good time for a reminder to turn out your lights at night. That simple action can help save birds from crashing into houses and dying.

It’s not a trivial problem. Birds migrate at night, and many of those birds are disoriented by outdoor lights, which lure them into deadly collisions with windows. Each year in North America, well over 1 billion birds are killed when they crash into buildings.

So turning out your lights on busy migration nights is especially important.

It looks like tomorrow, Tuesday, September 10, will be busy. The Aeroeco Lab at Colorado State University predicts that 783,000 birds will be migrating over Connecticut., as the accompanying map shows.

The Connecticut Audubon Society is part of the Lights Out Connecticut Coalition. In general, we’re asking state residents and businesses to help by turning out their lights from 11 p.m. to 6 a.m. during peak bird migration seasons — now through November 15 and from April 15 through May 31.

But we’ll send you a text alert when the Aeroeco Lab predicts a big migration night. Sign up here!

Big city buildings are partly to blame but not completely: in Connecticut, houses have more window square footage than offices. Nationwide, almost half of all window strikes are at houses or buildings smaller than three stories.

A study in Chicago demonstrated that when buildings turned out their lights, it cut the number of birds that died by crashing into those buildings by half.

Losing a billion birds a year to building collisions in an era when bird populations have fallen by 30 percent is just unacceptable. Turning outdoor lights out is an easy way to help birds, and it makes a difference.