My lovely new lady friend Sara is remarkable in many ways. Far from the least of which is is her love of birds and birdwatching. Every year she volunteers to watch out for migrating birds caught in the 9/11 memorial lights here in New York City. This is something that honestly hadn’t occurred to me (?!) but I’ve since learned is a big problem. I’m told migratory birds use lights (stars? sun?) to navigate by and these things play havoc with their ability to find their way. Confused and disoriented, they are attracted to and are ultimately trapped in the beams of light – they simply cannot escape. This has tragic consequences for their migration and survival.
This past Thursday night/Friday morning I joined Sara to spend the very early morning (4 am to 6 am) keeping a lookout, lying on our backs with our binoculars trained upwards. Thankfully while on our watch this wasn’t necessary but if there are a lot of birds trapped they turn the lights off for a few minutes to allow them to fly away. I’m very happy to report we saw very few (except for one amazing but unidentified bird of prey that swooped in and out of our field of vision [UPDATE: Sara is fairly certain this was a Peregrine Falcon. Wow]) and none caught for long directly in the lights therefore the memorial remained beaming up into the early morning sky.
Thank you Sara for taking me with you. I’d very much like to volunteer again next year.
