We’re in the beginning of spring bird migration here on the Gulf Coast, which means warblers, vireos, orioles, and thrushes coming through as they make their way up North. Around 2 billion birds make landfall along our coast from March to May after crossing the Gulf of Mexico. But even after the high-stakes crossing of open water, their next leg of the journey is no less perilous.
In this episode, our friends from Up From Dust tell us a story about a phenomenon threatening birds on their long flights, and we learn how we can all do our part to help them on their journeys.
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TRANSCRIPT
*cacophony of bird sounds if we can find*
We’re in the beginning of Spring bird migration here on the Gulf Coast, that means warblers, vireos, orioles and thrushes coming through as they make their way up North.
Charles Williams with the Louisiana Wildlife Federation, says he looks forward to not only seeing but also hearing the woodthrush.
WILLIAMS: There was a recent vote of the Louisiana Ornithological Society members. Uh, what is the most beautiful bird song in everyone's opinion? And the wood thrush was in the top three there
Let’s hear that award-winning bird song.
Woodthrush: https://macaulaylibrary.org/asset/247001691
Ok to me it sounds like an alarm, but who am I to question the Louisiana Ornithological Society?
Williams says woodthrush are some of the billions of birds who migrate back up from South and Central America towards Canada the Northern U.S. every year
WILLIAMS: They'll fly all the way across the Gulf in 20 hours or something, and then they'll end up coming into Louisiana, heading back from their winter period down in those countries. And uh, our state in Texas are the first land they hit.
While it’s an exciting time of year for birders like Williams, it’s also why he’s worried about these birds. During these peak migration times, every year he would notice something upsetting around his rural home in central Louisiana.
WILLIAMS: I found a few, uh, dead birds, uh, every year, particularly some species that I very much admire and like, one of which was the wood thrush, which is a declining species.
So he started looking into it and found bird populations are down, and bird strikes are part of the reason for that. Reflective windows and bright lights can confuse these birds and cause them to fly into buildings. That’s why he decided to start the Lights Out Louisiana campaign. It encourages people to turn their lights off during peak migration.
WILLIAMS: we need to be all mindful of it and do our bit because the problem is diffused. Every building in house potentially, uh, kills birds at some level
I’m Eva Tesfaye. Today on Sea Change, we’re bringing you an episode of another climate change podcast we love - Up From Dust.
It’s kind of like if Sea Change had a twin sister that lived inland.
And in this episode of Up From Dust, Celia Llopis-Jepsen talks about a phenomenon that connects the Midwest and the Gulf Coast – the birds that migrate between these two places each year. And she finds out how we can all do our part to help them on their journeys.
That story, after the break.
To learn what’s happening in the middle of the country, I got help from Andrew
Farnsworth. A visiting scientist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
Andrew – you could say he’s been studying migration since he was a kid growing up
near New York City –
ANDREW: You know, five or six. – running around with
grandpa’s binoculars and Peterson field guide – I was already taking notes about
what I was seeing.
And in 1980 there’s this night. Just after the sun went down.
Andrew’s seven. And he hears… – [green heron sound] –
ANDREW: Woah! (laughs) I know what that is! …. Like there’s no question.
This kid knows a green heron.
ANDREW: Very explosive. (Ambi)
And yet it doesn’t add up –
ANDREW: It’s up there (laughs), you know? And it’s dark.
That’s not normal, right? But then Andrew realizes it is migration season.
ANDREW: I remember making that connection. Most migrating birds use the cover of darkness.
Twice a year they cruise right over our oblivious heads. Hundreds of millions of them!
ANDREW: Hearing like, ‘oh, there’s a bird actually doing this.’ That was sort of a
huge spark moment.
Because nighttime migration wasn’t just a thing in his bird books. If he paid attention, he
could hear them crossing the black sky.
Decades later, Andrew’s still piecing together the mysteries of night flight. But with
technology, scientists like him have figured out a lot.
They use radar and thermal imagery.
AMBI Audio equipment to hear birds flying above.
Machine learning to parse all these huge amounts of data. This, by the way, that you’re
hearing – it’s night-time recordings of birds migrating in the dark.
AMBI: Night-time bird sounds cross fade into the music.
Let’s paint a picture of what it’s like.
Don’t just picture a bunch of orderly Vs – like Canada geese.
ANDREW: It’s not at all what it’s like.
This night world – it’s more like –
ANDREW: If you have a snow globe. Imagine every piece of glitter in it is a different bird.
If you kind of swirl the snow globe around.
Hummingbirds, herons, woodpeckers take flight.
ANDREW: moving in kind of like the same direction –
Yet with tons of variation and messiness, too. Loads of different species on the move.
ANDREW: Some that are really close to the ground –
Riding different winds in different directions.
ANDREW: Some that go up to these incredible altitudes of 15 or 20,000 feet.
They’ve got hundreds of miles to go. Or thousands. Some hopscotch, doing a few hours
a night. Others push through till morning. Some bigger birds can even keep on going.
ANDREW: More than a night, more than a day – like a couple days – at very high
altitudes where the winds are really favorable to make these incredible speedy
trips from somewhere far south in South America all the way to the Canadian
border or beyond in single shots.
And this midnight magic is especially fantastic in the midcontinent. Thanks to this
region’s good geography, landscapes and weather patterns.
ANDREW: That all focuses on that area kind of between the Rockies and the
Mississippi as the thoroughfare for birds in the Americas. If it’s not the biggest,
it’s certainly one of the biggest on the planet
– in terms of the corridors and the sheer numbers of birds that are using that area.
Even many shorebirds headed from South America to Canada’s east and west coasts
funnel through the Great Plains – far from any ocean – instead of following the
coastlines. And in fact, wetlands in Kansas – hundreds of miles from the nearest coast –
are fantastic for birders trying to find shorebirds.
ANDREW: There is an incredible tailwind scenario because of the way the Gulf of
Mexico is positioned – and the Rocky Mountains creating these low-level jet
streams that are basically like southerly winds blowing from the south that are
super supportive.
Birds need that help. Timing and efficiency are everything. In spring, a lot of them have
to fly way, way north in Canada. To boreal… even arctic areas.
ANDREW: Where you have these incredible explosions of food resources during
the northern hemisphere late spring and summer. Blackflies, mosquitoes.
Massive insect blooms. And that pulse of insects – that doesn’t last all summer.
Right? There’s a very particular window when that happens.
A window when birds need to claim territory, build a nest, hatch chicks. Raise them.
So, they’re hustling north for that window. Some nights, hundreds of millions of them are
flying along this central corridor northwards.
Spring migration is a few months long, but actual bird movement isn’t equally dispersed
in that timeframe. Mind-boggling numbers of birds pick specific nights to take wing. It’s
like they all got the same memo.
A memo that says: tailwinds, temperatures, everything’s lining up, guys. Let’s go!
Today, scientists can forecast those big travel nights. It’s called BirdCast. Andrew helps
run it. Birdcast releases maps every day during migration to show where in the U.S.
huge numbers of birds are expected to move each night.
And for some cities, like if you live in Kansas City or Chicago, you can even sign up to
receive alerts when there’s gonna be high migration numbers that night.
And when so many birds fly, btw, if there’s also a full moon – you can get a glimpse of it.
ANDREW: If you look with binoculars and a telescope at the full moon – not for
too long a period, because it is exceptionally bright and you will hurt your eyes if
you look for too long. But if you put a telescope or binoculars up to the face of
the moon … you will see birds passing.
Such heavy migration, it’s a stunning image. But it’s also why cities in the heart of the
continent are so threatening.
ANDREW: So where large numbers of birds overlap with humans and lots of light
at night, there’s the potential for a real challenge.
There are 7 cities that make up most of the top 10 list for the riskiest cities in our country for migrating birds each spring. Let’s tick through them: San Antonio, Dallas and Houston in the south. Then Kansas City and St Louis a bit farther north, and finally Minneapolis and Chicago.
And scientists can’t prove which cities kill the most birds. But this list is based on
everything that they’ve learned so far about migration and how birds are dying, etc.
ANDREW: And the light is attractive to birds and is disorienting.
These cities are glowing beacons of danger right where so many birds need to pass.
Some birds hit lit buildings, like McCormick in Chicago. Others land and wait for
daylight, then they smack into a window after the sun’s up. Or can’t find enough food.
Or get grabbed by a cat. Migration has served birds well. For a very long time. And light pollution, it’s so new.
ANDREW: You know, what – 100 to 150 years old? Depending on where you are
on the planet. Which is, you know, just sort of a glimpse in time.
A small blip in time but with colossal consequences. The latest research suggests
building collisions kill 1 billion birds each year. And that number is just for the US.
ANDREW: A billion birds every year is an enormous, enormous number. I mean
that is just like – it’s almost unfathomable.
That’s like 30 birds per second. Now, that number folds together two phenomena that
are hard to tease apart. Night-time deaths. When lights confuse birds and they slam into buildings. And day-time ones. When birds fly into glass because they can see blue skies and trees reflected in it. Or because they can actually see greenery that’s on the other side of the glass.
You may already know that North America has lost one-quarter of its bird population
over the past half century. All these collisions are a big factor. And yet. All is not lost. Let’s review why.
People like David check buildings in many cities. A lot of them are doing it as
volunteers. And thanks to them – we are learning a lot. And thanks to property owners willing to make changes, some buildings are now safer. In 2017 about 400 migrating birds hit an office building in Galveston, Texas. And almost immediately, the company turned off the floodlights that normally lit up the facade. It also worked with the local Audubon to raise awareness.
And this Lights Out movement keeps growing. In Texas. two dozen cities and counties
so far have pledged to cut back on non-essential light during migration.
But Andrew says you don’t need to own office buildings or convention centers – or even
live in the middle of a bustling downtown to help. We can all make a difference here.
CELIA: Even on small buildings, even in suburbia, even, you know, the housing
development where I live?
ANDREW: Yeah. Yeah. So the notion that the problem is just in cities is wrong.
Your kitchen window, your living room window, your glass door. You know,
whatever it is when you walk outside and you find a dead bird beneath glass –
you can address that.
For example by turning off extra lights outside your house. Or drawing the kitchen
curtain closed at night. Or hanging something on your most problematic windows.
How to get started?
Frankly, the easiest thing – visiting American Bird Conservancy’s website.
That’s ABCbirds.org. There are lots of options. From good old window screens to subtle
vertical cords. Translucent tape stripes. And of course the dotted film, like at
McCormick. These all help birds recognize a pane of glass as a solid thing they can’t fly
through.
CELIA: You talked about a billion birds and that's – it’s mind boggling and it’s
sad. I wonder if you feel hope that we can tackle a problem that big.
ANDREW: Yeah, I do. I mean, there are a lot of challenges in the world. This is
one of them, obviously. One of many. But I do feel like in a lot of ways, this one is
a pretty easy one in the sense that there are very specific kinds of actions that
lead to conservation successes.
And in particular when it comes to reducing light pollution. Drawing curtains closed or
turning off lights we don’t need. Even just joining seasonal Lights Out programs during
peak migration. And doing these things – it doesn’t just help birds.
ANDREW: Especially when you start to think of all of the additional good things
that come with these actions to stop birds from dying. Like on the light side – the
energy saving, the human health benefits of turning lights off at night and not
using them.
These kinds of things sort of all go hand in hand, sort of making that a no brainer.
So! All those additional good things Andrew mentioned? That come from cutting light
pollution? We’re gonna keep digging into that and we’ve got just the people to help us
out in one of our upcoming episodes.
CREDITS
You can listen to the full episode or other episodes of Up From Dust from KCUR on apple, spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
Thanks for listening to Sea Change! This episode was hosted by me, Eva Tesfaye. Our executive producer is Carlyle Calhoun. Our theme music is by Jon Batiste and our sound designer is Kurt Kohnen.
Sea Change is a WWNO and WRKF production. We are part of the NPR Podcast Network and distributed by PRX. And to help others find our podcast, hit subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.(OR: And to help others find our podcast, please share this episode with a friend!)
Sea Change is made possible with major support from the Gulf Research Program of the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. WWNO’s Coastal Desk is supported by the Walton Family Foundation, the Meraux (Meer - O) Foundation, and the Greater New Orleans Foundation.
We’ll be back in two weeks.
CREDITS
This episode of Sea Change Live was hosted by Eva Tesfaye. Our executive producer is Carlyle Calhoun. Sound design by Kurt Kohnen, and our theme music is by Jon Batiste.
This episode was reported by Up From Dust Host Celia Llopis-Jepsen.
Sea Change is a WWNO and WRKF production. We are part of the NPR Podcast Network and distributed by PRX. Sea Change is made possible with major support from the Gulf Research Program of the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. WWNO’s Coastal Desk is supported by the Walton Family Foundation, the Meraux Foundation, and the Greater New Orleans Foundation.
CREDITS
This episode of Sea Change Live was hosted by Eva Tesfaye. Our executive producer is Carlyle Calhoun. Sound design by Kurt Kohnen, and our theme music is by Jon Batiste.
This episode was reported by Up From Dust Host Celia Llopis-Jepsen.
Sea Change is a WWNO and WRKF production. We are part of the NPR Podcast Network and distributed by PRX. Sea Change is made possible with major support from the Gulf Research Program of the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. WWNO’s Coastal Desk is supported by the Walton Family Foundation, the Meraux Foundation, and the Greater New Orleans Foundation.
