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Download lights out birds7/27/2023 ![]() Drawn to the light, they descend and become trapped in the urban maze, unable to distinguish between street lamps and stars, real light and reflected light, bona fide trees and mirrored images of trees in windows. Migrating birds, who use the moon, stars and electromagnetic fields to help them navigate their journeys, become disoriented by the bright steel and glass structures below them. The birds provide material for the 300 or so researchers who visit every year to study migration habits, global warming, bird-plane collisions, environmental hazards, disease and, of special interest to the Lights Out communities, the damage done by the sirenlike lights that surround our city centers. There, ornithologists preserve the bodies and add many of them to the institution’s collection of 600,000 dead birds. Members of Lights Out Baltimore and Lights Out DC cap each spring and fall migration season by taking their frozen birds and inventory lists to the Smithsonian. They walk the same route each morning it is a routine echoed in cities across North America: Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Toronto, Washington. She and fellow volunteers such as librarian Lynne Parks are part of a growing micro-movement to effect environmental change, one dead bird at a time. She is also a member of Lights Out Baltimore, an organization, started in 2008, that scours the streets in the predawn hours to collect birds - dead or stunned - that have collided with windows in the city’s corporate canyons. Jacks is a bird keeper at the Maryland Zoo in Baltimore (the bar-code tattoo honors her favorite charge, Penguin No. “That way,” he says, indicating that Jacks should sign in for her meeting with Brian Schmidt, the museum specialist who will accept her offering. ![]() ![]() “What’s in the cooler?” the security guard asks.Ĭurt nod. The 30-year-old bird lover has a penguin-related tattoo on her arm, a cooler in her hand and a Safeway bag knocking against her leg. Lindsay Jacks shows up at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History a day before the federal shutdown.
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