PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — An initiative to reduce fatalities among birds that are migrating through Philadelphia this season is back.
The Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University leads Bird Safe Philly, a coalition of partners that raises awareness and implements solutions for birds that crash into tall city buildings. Nocturnal migrating birds are often attracted to bright, artificial lights, and they become confused and slam into them.
The group’s Lights Out Philly initiative has returned for a second year with the goal of avoiding these deadly crashes.
“Birds have multiple ways of navigating, whether that is using the sun, if they’re daytime migrants, but a lot of these are nighttime migrants,” explained Jason Weckstein, curator of ornithology and associate professor in the Department of Biodiversity, Earth and Environmental Science.
“These nocturnal migrants are using the stars, magnetism, maybe other cues as well. And when you get a low ceiling, you get bright lights, they fly into those bright lights. And if there is a building there, they smack into the building.”
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Each year, tens of millions of birds fly through Philadelphia during spring and fall migration, and up to 1 billion die across the U.S. each year by flying into bright buildings and windows.
The initiative asks Philly building owners and managers to simply turn off or minimize their lights at night, between midnight and 6 a.m., so as to not disorient the birds. The effort runs now through May 31, and again in the fall, from Aug. 15 to Nov. 15.
The partnership was formed following a mass bird casualty in October 2020, when more than 1,000 migrating birds smashed into Philadelphia skyscrapers.
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Throughout the years, dead migratory birds have been collected and studied at the Academy of Natural Sciences. In side-by-side, floor-to-ceiling cabinets, researchers keep 220,000 specimens of birds from around the world. Some of the specimens died as a result of flying into buildings when migrating through Philadelphia.
“The research footprint of this single specimen that just came to us as a window kill can be massive,” said Nathan Rice, ornithology collection manager, “not only just for this time when it comes in, but it can be generational. Ten years from now, 25 years from now, and 100 years from now, this specimen will still be here and be available and useful for all sorts of scientific questions.”
Weckstein added that these specimens are powerful tools in understanding change over time, especially amid rapid developments like climate change.
“They only allow us to answer questions about that if we have a series of collections across those time periods,” he said.
“We collect tissues because that gives us DNA data, which allows us to build genealogies,” he continued. They can research and discover, “what’s the population history? The DNA changes over time, and those changes record the history of organisms, the history of living things over time. That history is sitting here in our drawers, and we can unlock that to understand all kinds of things and help us answer questions about conservation.”