Little things can make big differences. Like four-inch long birds. Or turning off bright lights at night at times. So, congratulations to the National Park Service for taking a small step to make things just a bit better for wildlife and the ecology by turning off the lights at the St. Louis Gateway Arch at night during May.
The Arch, of course, is the symbol of St. Louis, the “Gateway to the West”, a 630-foot tall (also 630-foot wide as it turns out) steel arch overlooking the Mississippi River, opened in 1965. It looks great and makes the city instantly recognizable on film during the day, but for years it was close to invisible at night. Logically, people had the idea of lighting it up at night to make it seen and make the skyline more impressive. By the late-’90s, it was generally illuminated nightly by 44 bright floodlights, usually bright white although pink in October (Breast Cancer month) and occasionally other tones to fit the day.
All of that is great…unless you’re a tired bird. As with many other tall, bright buildings, it unfortunately confuses and attracts migrating birds, which all too frequently collide with it, knocking them dead to the ground. It’s not entirely clear why, but it would seem that the bright lights confuse the flyers, or else they mistake them for bright stars since many seemingly navigate by following specific stars or constellations. NPR cite studies that suggest close to a billion birds a year die of that cause in the States, and that St. Louis is probably the fifth worst city for those collisions, after Chicago, Houston, Dallas and New York City. One organization that monitors the ground in a single square mile of Chicago every spring find 5000 or more dead birds that met their demise by running into the bright lights. The reason St. Louis, (as well as Chicago, Dallas and Houston) are such bird death magnets is that they lie right underneath the so-called Mississippi Flyway, the busiest of four major paths migrating birds follow between their winter homes in the South and the summer nesting grounds, often in Canada. Think of them as the natural interstates for feathered friends. The National Park Service suggest fully 40% of all North American ducks and geese follow it, and half of the migrating songbirds. Most of the tiny Blackburnian Warblers – smaller than a regular sparrow and weighing the same as two nickels – (seen below) follow that path of about 3500 or so miles between their summer homes in the boreal forests of Canada and the upper Midwest and their wintering grounds in Venezuela and the South American Andes. Like most songbirds, they migrate at night, and rest and feed as much as possible in the daylight hours.
Such collisions not only seem tragic and unfair (it’s got to be incredibly tough for a bird the size of a mouse with wings to fly thousands of miles over two weeks or so without having to worry about a steel monolith that their ancestors never encountered standing in their way), it’s bad for the environment. Most of the songbirds affected are warblers, vireos, thrushes… small birds that eat a whole lot of bugs. Many eat close to their own body weight in flies, mosquitoes, wasps, caterpillars, plant-killing beetles and mites daily. You name the bug, there’s something that eats it , and when their populations decline, the nuisance bug numbers and their resultant problems increase wildly. Turning the lights off lets the vast majority of the long-distance travelers fly by, above the rooftop level unfazed.
Thus the Arch stands dark in May, when almost all the migrating songbirds are heading north, and a number of other office buildings in some of the cities mentioned as well as Toronto to the north voluntarily turn off any lights in unused parts of the building at night. Each dark empty office at midnight means just a few more brilliantly colored warblers arriving safely in forests and fields of the land, adding color to the landscape and removing a lot of much less desireable flying critters from them. And, it even saves some money for the building owners. A small thing, but a big difference.
Everydave Life 