Prevention
Lights out
One badly aimed streetlight can ground a whole night of fledglings. We map the worst spots and work with towns to shield, dim or switch them off during the season.
Picking birds off the road is the losing end
Every bird we carry to the centre is a bird that should never have come down. Fledglings leave the burrow on a moonless night and navigate by the horizon glow over the sea. A streetlight that throws light upwards reads as that horizon. The bird turns inland, circles until it is exhausted, and lands.
So we spend the other half of the year on lamp posts instead of birds. Each season we log where every rescue happened, down to the pole. After three seasons the map is unambiguous: a small number of fixtures account for most of the groundings.
What we ask of a town
Rarely darkness. Usually a shield on top of the fixture so the light goes down instead of sideways, a warmer bulb, and a curfew on decorative and car park lighting between ten at night and five in the morning during the fledging window. It costs a town very little and it removes the problem at the source.
Where it stands
Two municipalities now run a full seasonal curfew on their seafront lighting. A third is trialling shields on the stretch that generated the most calls last year. Every fixture we get changed is roughly forty birds a season that never need a volunteer at all.