MADISON, Wis. (WRN) — Wisconsin residents, businesses and municipalities are being urged to turn off their non-essential lights tonight to help migrating birds.
Craig Thompson is the co-founder of Driftless Birds, a non-profit working to save Wisconsin birds:
“Birds use a number of visual cues to migrate, and those that migrate at night have traditionally used celestial cues, so they’re navigating off the stars and off the position and brightness of the moon, and so on. And when they encounter artificial light, they become very disoriented,” Thompson said.
Non-essential lights should be shut off between the hours of 11 p.m. and 6 a.m. Studies have shown that window collisions kill billions of birds a year.