Join Us: Lights Out Texas to Help Migrating Birds
The fall bird migration is underway, and Texas is welcoming hundreds of millions of birds migrating through our state to their southern wintering grounds.
We hope you will join us in supporting an important effort to protect birds by turning off non-essential lighting at night during critical migration periods. Dallas has proclaimed the period through October 10th, 2020, as Lights Out Nights. The proclamation asks our residents and businesses, especially in downtown Dallas, to dim or turn off their non-essential lighting from 11 p.m. until 6 a.m.
Taking action now is vital because every spring and fall, nearly two billion birds – between a quarter and a third of all birds migrating at night through the United States – travel through Texas in one of the planet’s great wildlife spectacles. Light pollution is a growing and under-recognized threat to these birds. The light emanating from our cities disorients the birds, leaving them confused and making them vulnerable to collisions with buildings and other urban threats. In fact, up to one billion birds die in collisions with buildings in the United States annually.
The Lights Out Texas effort conserves energy and is led by a coalition that includes ordinary Texans and institutions such as the Dallas Zoo, the Perot Museum of Nature and Science, Houston Audubon, Texan by Nature, the Texas Conservation Alliance, and scientists at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Colorado State University.
We know that you care deeply about protecting wildlife and the ecosystem that sustains us and future generations. So please join us by turning out the lights.