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Every year during the spring and fall months, tens of millions of birds pass through cities such as Philadelphia. 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.
Simply turning your lights off from midnight until 6am during the spring migration from April 1 through May 31, and during the fall migration from August 15 through November 15 can potentially reduce bird collision death by up to 80%. For more information about Lights Out in the Philadelphia area, check out this fact sheet from Bird Safe Philly. You can also visit this page on Audubon’s website to learn more about nationwide Lights Out efforts.
The Bird Migration Explorer is a tool developed by the National Audubon Society, which tracks the heroic annual journeys made by over 450 bird species nationwide. Click below to learn more about our local migratory species, along with their locations and the conservation challenges they face.
The National Audubon Society recently received a $2 million dollar grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service to support the expansion of the Bird-Friendly Maple program. The investment is part of $145 million in Inflation Reduction Act funding to connect landowners to emerging climate markets. Audubon’s Bird-Friendly Maple program is a market-based approach that incentivizes maple producers to manage their sugarbushes (forests that are used to produce maple syrup) in ways that provide forest bird habitat and increase forest sustanability through unique product labeling and marketing opportunities. Biologically and structurally diverse sugarbushes offer great places for birds to forage, find cover, and raise their young. They are also likely to have better long-term sap production, fewer forest health problems, and are better able to adapt to the stresses of climate change.
Pennsylvania is the 6th largest maple-producing state in the country. This grant enables Audubon’s Forest Program in the Mid-Atlantic to roll out Bird-friendly Maple for maple producers in our region to provide technical and habitat management expertise. Through these market-based incentives, Audubon can help maple syrup producers not only provide important habitat for declining forest birds but also provide the public with bird-friendly syrup! You can read more about the grant and the maple program here.
When shopping for maple syrup, be sure to look for the maple syrup containers with the label indicating the syrup was produced in a Bird-Friendly forest habitat. Maple sugarbushes can be good for birds, but forests that are managed with birds in mind are even better!
Help secure the future for birds at risk from climate change, habitat loss and other threats. Your support will power our science, education, advocacy and on-the-ground conservation efforts.
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