Each year during fall and spring migrations, nearly two billion birds travel through Texas navigating with the night sky in one of the planet’s great wildlife spectacles.
However, as they pass over big cities on their way, they can become disoriented by bright artificial lights and skyglow, often causing them to collide with buildings or windows.
While lights can throw birds off their migration paths, bird fatalities are more directly caused by the amount of energy the birds waste flying around and calling out in confusion. The exhaustion can then leave them vulnerable to other urban threats. Just one building can cause major problems for birds in the area; within one week in 2017, nearly 400 passerines (warblers, grosbeaks, etc.) were caught in the floodlights of a 32-story Texas skyscraper and killed via window collisions.
Lights Out, Texas is a statewide campaign of education, awareness, and action to address this problem. The goal is to reduce migratory bird mortality by increasing statewide participation of cities and building owners to turn off non-essential lights.
