Air quality, light pollution impacts bird migration and human health

SALT LAKE CITY — Experts are urging Utahns to turn off their lights and close their curtains from now through October to help birds migrate.

Tracy Aviary community programs coordinator Kylee Ehmann said turning out the lights from 11 p.m. to 6 a.m. helps keep our bird population safer.

“Migration is a really taxing thing for birds to do,” she said. “It requires a lot of energy. They’re navigating dangerous cities. When you turn on your lights, the birds who rely on their senses to navigate, they get confused and they get stuck in cities.”

Ehmann said many kinds of bird species are preparing to migrate or are already migrating in mass numbers. They’re heading south, where they can find more food for winter.

“A lot of birds migrate at night, it’s cooler, there’s less predators they need to worry about, and so it’s safer for them,” she said.

Light pollution can make their journey more dangerous. Wildfire smoke also impacts them.

“If it’s not good for us, it’s not good for things with smaller lungs than we have,” Ehmann said. “When they fly lower, they’re closer to cities or closer to those high rises, which are really dangerous for birds. Birds can’t see windows very well. They don’t see glass. They see it as the reflection which shows them more sky, more grass.”

She said the light and smoke make them disoriented, which often results in them crashing into windows. She said millions of birds die every year by flying into glass.

“Every year we do our Salt Lake Avian Collisions Survey, and our conservation department and a lot of volunteers go all around downtown Salt Lake in the mornings, all through migration season, both the spring in the fall. And they find birds who have hit windows and they tag them and they find what buildings they hit,” Ehmann said.

She said switching off the lights and closing the blinds really does help them use less energy to get to their next stop.

Anything we can do to help birds helps us in the long run. Birds play an important role in our ecosystem.

“They help pollinate our world, they help bring flowers and fruits,” Ehmann said. “If we don’t have a healthy enough bird population, you’re going to get a large amount of bugs that we consider pests.”

She said their health is often a reflection of how healthy our environment is.

“You might have heard of the phrase ‘a canary in the coal mine.’ Birds do have more fragile lungs than us. So if you’re seeing a lot of die-offs, then you might also see a lot of impacts on human health,” Ehmann said.

To hear the birdsong again in spring, we can turn off our lights now.

Ehmann said dark skies are beneficial to humans, too.

“There’s a lot of studies that our circadian rhythms are broken by a lot of our modern lives,” she said.

Ehmann said there are more small things you can do to help bird migration. Adding stickers or ribbon to windows and sliding doors can help prevent them from colliding into it. She said people can also advocate at their local level to dim or add covers to their street lights.