Light pollution makes birds work overtime.
Streetlamps, buildings and other human-made sources pollute the night with artificial light. This extra brightness can lead to birds singing nearly an hour longer per day, researchers have found. That number comes from a new study of nearly 600 bird species around the world.
How much the singing increased took the researchers by surprise. “We expected some behavioral adjustment to the lights at night,” says Neil Gilbert. But “we didn’t anticipate that it would be this impactful.” Gilbert is an ecologist at the Oklahoma State University in Stillwater. He studies how human actions impact wildlife behavior.
Past research has shown that artificial light has a big impact on wildlife. Birds that migrate at night can become disoriented by the lights. This can cause them to crash into buildings, leading to injuries and even death.
The cycle between day and night also plays a part in controlling behavior and hormones in some birds. Artificial lights can mess with these natural rhythms. That can change when birds sleep, breed and migrate. Some studies have shown that certain bird species become active earlier in the day in light-polluted areas.
Early birds and night owls
Gilbert and his colleague Brent Pease wanted to know how light affects birds on a much larger scale. Pease is a wildlife ecologist at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. The duo used data from BirdWeather. In this global citizen science project, volunteers record bird sounds. Machine learning analyzes each sound to identify the species.
Gilbert and Pease filtered the dataset for 4.4 million bird calls. They then looked at the daily start and end times of 583 bird species’ songs. And they compared those times to the local light-pollution levels.
In the brightest places, birds sang an average 50 minutes longer than in the darkest places. They sang some 18 minutes more in the morning and 32 minutes in the evening. The researchers shared their findings August 21 in Science.
Light’s effects were especially noticeable for species with larger eyes. This may be because such birds are more sensitive to light. One of these species is the killdeer (Charadrius vociferus). It’s a shorebird found across much of North America.
The effect of light pollution was also greater during the breeding season. This is when birds naturally start singing earlier, during darker morning hours. If they live in light-polluted areas, artificial lights might fool them into thinking it’s later than it is. This can encourage them to sing even earlier.
It’s still unclear whether this extra singing is harmful to birds. It might disrupt their sleep, says Gilbert. But the birds might make up for that by sleeping during the day. Extra time awake may even be helpful. It could give birds more time to find food to feed their young.
For Pease, the findings show just how much people can impact wildlife without meaning to. “We cast [lights] more or less mindlessly into the night,” Pease says. Yet these lights “are having widespread and often subtle effects on the lives of animals all around us.”
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