Lights Out
Around the country in our largest cities, skyscrapers glow brightly through the night. Suburban streetlights glare through bedroom windows. Unshielded outdoor lighting floods the sky, which in some places no longer reveals a twinkling firmament of stars but only a sort of extended twilight.

According to Bob Gent of the International Dark-Sky Association, a nonprofit organization that was started to benefit astronomers but has extended its efforts into the natural world, 30 percent of outdoor lighting (plus some indoor lighting) is wasted, at a cost of $10.4 billion and 38 million tons of carbon a year in the United States alone. The good news is, the situation is fairly easy to remedy. We don't have to turn everything off, said Gent. It's about using the right amount of light, and only when and where it's needed.

Saving energy is a valuable goal in its own right, but the plight of migratory birds has caught the imagination of concerned citizens as well, leading to a two-pronged argument for a reduction in artificial lighting. In 2005, the City of Toronto (in partnership with FLAP, among other groups) launched "Lights Out Toronto!," a public awareness campaign aimed specifically at encouraging individuals, businesses, property owners, and building managers to help reduce avian mortality. Since then, Chicago, New York City, Detroit, and Minneapolis have followed suit. In 2007, an estimated 2.2 million residents of Sydney, Australia, switched off their lights during "Earth Hour," briefly reducing that city's energy use by more than 10 percent. And on March 29, 2008, more than two dozen cities worldwide dimmed their lights in an hour-long demonstration of energy- and bird-saving solidarity organized by the World Wildlife Fund.

Currently, San Francisco is gearing up for its own Lights Out program, due to begin in mid-February and to continue year-round, rather than being restricted to the spring and fall migration periods. Targeting the 50 tallest buildings (34 of which are more than 400 feet high, including the 853-foot TransAmerica Pyramid), the City's Department of the Environment and the Golden Gate chapter of the Audubon Society, in conjunction with the American Bird Conservancy, are spearheading the effort, which will encourage installation of occupancy sensors where possible, or manual lights-out or nighttime curtain-drawing efforts. Pacific Gas & Electric, which is working with many downtown office tower owners and managers to conserve energy, is on board as well, and will offer both education and incentives.

This summer, volunteers have been pounding the sidewalks below San Francisco's skyscrapers, gathering statistics on bird mortality. "It's difficult," commented the Audubon Society's Noreen Weeden. "Most of our volunteers want to go out and see live birds. Here, people have to get up really early and walk around downtown and survey before 6 a.m., because at that time building maintenance people are out with power washers and spraying everything down, and after 6 you can't really tell." Despite this logistical difficulty, the results are conclusive--adding a little more fuel to the argument the City will start bringing this November to building owners and managers, to convince them to make a change come February.

"One of the biggest challenges," said Mesure, "is that the vast majority of people don't understand the diverse world of birds. To the average individual, a bird is a bird is a bird. If the only bird they recognize is an American robin, then every bird is an American robin." Not only that, but in an urban environment, most people encounter very little wildlife--and the most common sort of wildlife they do encounter is birds. "So in the back of people's minds," Mesure continued, "birds are holding their own. But that poor panda bear in some other part of the world that we don't see but that we hear so many horrible things about, and it's cute and cuddly, they'll gravitate toward helping to support that sort of issue. So it's about education on issues that we have right here on our doorstep."

Weeden said that the bird carcasses being collected now from San Francisco streets will be donated to the University of California Berkeley Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, which will compile a geospatial species map. The birds will also be used for educational purposes. "It's the best possible outcome, given their sacrifice," she commented. Gehring echoed this view. "I'm a scientist, and so I'm taught to not care about the individual carcass on the ground. But of course, every time I see a carcass, it bothers me. It's part of my soul. And so it's so nice to potentially see a resolution to this issue. These birds didn't die in vain, like they've been doing for decades. Hopefully we can learn something from their death and make a difference with it."