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04/26/2024 02:59 PMBirds are flying north at night again, as they have for millennia. What’s new in the past decade is that anyone with an Internet browser can watch the avian flyways and even get estimates of how many birds are flying on the BirdCast Migration Dashboard by visiting birdcast.info.
The dashboard showcases spring and fall migrations across the country during peak months. Researchers use weather radar data to track the number of birds that travel through—creating a year-to-year picture of the birds’ timing and numbers.
The ongoing Birdcast study confirms that many birds never reach their destinations due to various interrelated problems. However, the single biggest problem facing these night-flying migrants may be light pollution.
Say the word “pollution,” and most people will likely think of air and water. But Artificial Light at Night (ALAN) is an environmental pollutant that harms many species, not only night-flying migratory birds. It affects mammals, pollinating insects, reptiles, amphibians, and people.
Now, here’s the good news: As pollution problems go, this one can be reduced with the flick of a switch.
The benefits of reducing nighttime light pollution are many.
Clear, Immediate Benefits
For starters, people may get more and better-quality sleep. Neighbors could settle issues about lights trespassing from one property to another. Energy bills could be reduced, and along with them, the carbon footprint of energy usage. Our children and grandchildren might experience the sight of the Milky Way in Connecticut night skies. The state would be a better place for migratory birds and other wildlife.
According to Emily May of the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, about two-thirds of all pollination may take place at night. Night lighting sends moths, in particular, into the circling behavior that often results in their deaths. With less night light, nocturnal pollinators have a better chance at finding and spreading pollen, which increases the chances of more fruit and vegetable production.
With less night light, there might even be more sparkling fireflies on summer nights. Researchers have shown that male fireflies need darkness as they scout for female signals.
“Unlike so many other environmental problems, solutions to this one have clear and immediate human benefits, too” said Craig Repasz during a recent presentation in Old Saybrook on behalf of an organization he co-chairs, Lights Out Connecticut. “The benefits are hard to ignore.”
Repasz and Lights Out co-chair Meredith Barges have teamed up with Leo Smith, who leads the Connecticut Chapter of Dark Skies International (darksky.org/). The group is bringing new energy to the issue of reducing of light pollution.
Among their recent accomplishments, the advocates garnered support from conservation organizations and local lights-out advocates statewide to help pass the “Lights Out Bill” signed by Governor Lamont in 2023.
The bill requires all state-owned buildings to shut off all nonessential lights from 11 p.m. to 6 a.m. every night, all year, says Repasz about Public Act No. 23-143, which went into effect in 2024. This not only protects night-flying birds but also saves taxpayer money.
During the 2024 legislative session, Lights Out Connecticut and Dark Skies submitted language to be included in the Climate Change Bill HB 5004.
“Unfortunately, the bill was voted out of the Environment Committee without our changes,” says Repasz. “But now we will try to get some amendments to the state building code. These proposals will address standards for new buildings and major retrofits.”
The standards will specify down-shielding of lights, decreasing lumens to 100, and amber-colored bulbs, for example.
In addition to public presentations and legislative advocacy, the two lights-out organizations are collaborating on model dark sky guidelines for municipalities to adopt in their ordinances and regulations.
Easily Adapted
“These guidelines will most often be adopted as ordinances to modify an existing zoning or other municipal code,” Repasz says. “However, the text can easily be adapted to fit other municipal building laws and sustainability measures.” He invites anyone to see the model standards by scrolling down the group’s homepage (www.lightsoutct.org/). In another project, Leo Smith has compiled existing regulations from about two-thirds of the state’s 169 municipalities. The collaborators aim to expand this work into a searchable database.
The group also published a guide to bird-friendly buildings in response to the problem of bird fatalities created by building strikes, created by co-chair Meredith Barges.
Lights Out Connecticut has a busy presentation schedule throughout the state, with more than a dozen events during April alone. See www.lightsoutct.org/events for their calendar. Also, read about their invitation to take the “lights out pledge” to turn off unnecessary outdoor and indoor lights each night from 11 p.m. to 6 a.m. during peak migration seasons, April 1 to May 31 and Aug. 15 to Nov. 15. This simple act reduces light pollution and offers migratory birds safer passage.
Not a New Issue
It was 1994 when astronomy fan Bob Crelin of Branford took his young daughter to see the stars from their backyard. Looking up, he realized that the galaxy was not visible even on a clear night. There was too much artificial light.
Disappointed and concerned, Crelin became one of the state’s earliest dark skies activists. Over the following three years, he and some like-minded compatriots campaigned for more responsible lighting and worked with Branford municipal officials to craft the state's first dark sky lighting standards. The standards were adopted in 1997.
He also wrote two books on night skies: a children’s book, There Once Was a Sky Full of Stars (Sky Pub), and a children's book, Faces of the Moon (Charlesbridge).
Crelin and a friend went on to design light shields for retrofit on incandescent outdoor lamps. As the 1990s turned into the 2000s, Crelin was glad to observe positive changes in commercial lighting around his town.
“But then LEDs came along,” he says, referring to the meteoric rise of indoor and outdoor LED lighting. “They were a definite setback to the fight against light pollution. LEDs are much harder to shield.” Indeed, Crelin is not alone in that and other observations about the LED onslaught. “The blue-white color is the worst thing for living creatures,” he adds.
LEDs (light-emitting diodes) have existed for many decades, but their mass market breakthroughs occurred in the 2010s. Indeed, they consume less power than incandescent and other earlier technologies and have longer service lifetimes.
Some environmentally-minded commentators hoped that LEDs would reduce worldwide power consumption as they replaced incandescent lighting. However, LEDs proved so versatile and inexpensive that manufacturers found more applications for the technology. Consumers decided to install more LED light fixtures. To date, LED power savings have never been realized.
But it was the blue-white color of LED light that raised new concerns.
In his bestseller Why We Sleep (Scribner, 2017), sleep researcher Matthew Walker explains that before artificial light was invented, “… the setting sun would take with it this full stream of daylight from our eyes, sensed by the twenty-four-hour clock within the brain.” The loss of this natural light-dark cycle interferes with our biological well-being, he writes. But the widespread use of blue-white LED light adds insult to injury. Walker says, “The light receptors in the eye that communicate daytime are most sensitive to short wavelength light within the blue spectrum . . . Consequently, evening blue LED light has twice the harmful impact…”
It turns out that lights on the blue-white end of the light spectrum are also very bad for insects, birds, and other mammals.
Luckily, we can still take advantage of LED benefits by choosing “Dark Skies compliant” LEDs with amber-yellow light. Dark Skies International offers a guide to recommended lighting, links to suppliers, and a certification program. Resources are listed at the end of the article.
I learned about amber LEDS a few years ago when it came time to replace some of my home’s outdoor lighting. I used the Dark Skies directory and found a wonderful amber-colored LED lamp with a built-in motion sensor. The product is attractive, and the lighting more than adequate.
The birds work hard on the night shift. Why not give them a break?
Additional Resources:
Five Principles for Dark Sky Compliant Lighting:
1. Use light only when useful.
2. Aim only where needed.
3. Minimize brightness.
4. Light only when needed.
5. Use warmer color lights (amber-yellow).
Source: DarkSky International and Illuminating Engineering Society
Kathy Connolly writes about landscape ecology and landscape design from Old Saybrook. Contact: Kathy@SpeakingofLandscapes.com.