The original study published in Science [1] has a better title:
Light pollution prolongs avian activity
> They found that birds were generally vocal for nearly an hour longer in the presence of light pollution. Furthermore, birds that are more exposed, or entrained, to light were more affected, such as those with large eyes and open nests.
The Gizmodo article takes a bit to get to the reference point, being light pollution (I originally mistakenly thought it was a relative to time).
What is the impact of an increase of energy spend each day by this birds? They need more food, so they will eat more insects and grain.
I doubt that it is a negligible amount. It could easy affect the amount of birds that an ecosystem can host, and way more things down the line.
All these rapid changes can mess up the equilibrium in our ecosystems. Light pollution also affects insect behavior. If light pollution makes birds consume more insects and it also reduces the number of insects it is an accumulative problem.
According to the study methods [1], data was taken from BirdWeather, which is crowdsourced from users running local BirdNET [2], including BirdNET-Pi and BirdNET-Go [3], which runs easily on most Raspberry Pi (including slowly on Zero 2 W). BirdNET has popped up a few times on HN [4].
Does it prolong activity, or enable prolonged activity? I’ve seen flocks of waterfowl fly along lit roads at night, taking sharp turns at intersections, seemingly navigating by the light patterns.
It must have been around 15 years ago I first noticed birds singing in the dead of night near street lights. Light pollution is up there with noise pollution as my least favourite things about living in a society. Both seem to be mostly due to cars as it happens. It's kind of absurd that we talk about energy saving etc. but light up entire damn streets all through the night for no reason.
Light pollution affects behavior of most animals we bother to study, it's only one topic of many in the book but Ed Yong's 2022 book An Immense World covers this for insects in particular. Some of it can be mitigated mostly by simply changing the color of the light or frequency of flashing.
Super efficient LEDs have made this problem totally out of control. Incredibly bright while also being very cheap to run.
Paranoid/careless jackasses are lining their houses with 100,000 lumen cool white prison lights they bought on amazon for $30.
Parking lots are getting filled with ridiculously bright street lights because "Brighter = better? Right?". Just enough light to see? No! We need to recreate the sun for this vacant lot all night every night!
It's worse than that. The high-flicker, narrow-band LEDs used for most LED streetlights today create insanely bad color discrepancy and distortion due to motion.
It's a crime against nature and a crime against humanity that cities have allowed such a scourge to proliferate, when we have the science and technology for much better LED street lights.
It gets even worse because in order to make up for these discrepancies and distortion, manufacturers just.... turn them up brighter, fundamentally ignoring the problem and only making it worse.
It's bad enough that this affects drivers and pedestrians, but think of all of the animals who don't get a say, and who are even more sensitive to the flicker and lack of color information.
Light pollution is also inside our homes. Well before the sun rises and well after the sun sets, we have the power to flick a switch and have an instant Sun!
I have to think that if the birds are chirping 50 minutes longer then what are humans doing? 50 minutes longer or even 100 minutes longer?
And how does that affect our sleep which affects our mood which affects our communication and affects our world?
Humans have been staying up late next to a bright light (fire) for longer than we've been Homo sapiens. Considering humans have unique physiological adaptations to smoke (heavy tear and mucus production) I think it's plausible that our circadian rhythms also adapted and aren't quite as sensitive to red/yellow light as other primates. Blue light, however...
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[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 48.7 ms ] threadLight pollution prolongs avian activity
> They found that birds were generally vocal for nearly an hour longer in the presence of light pollution. Furthermore, birds that are more exposed, or entrained, to light were more affected, such as those with large eyes and open nests.
The Gizmodo article takes a bit to get to the reference point, being light pollution (I originally mistakenly thought it was a relative to time).
[1] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adv9472
I doubt that it is a negligible amount. It could easy affect the amount of birds that an ecosystem can host, and way more things down the line.
All these rapid changes can mess up the equilibrium in our ecosystems. Light pollution also affects insect behavior. If light pollution makes birds consume more insects and it also reduces the number of insects it is an accumulative problem.
- Light pollution is a driver of insect declines: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00063...
[1] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adv9472
[2] https://birdnet.cornell.edu/
[3] https://github.com/Nachtzuster/BirdNET-Pi and https://github.com/tphakala/birdnet-go
[4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Paranoid/careless jackasses are lining their houses with 100,000 lumen cool white prison lights they bought on amazon for $30.
Parking lots are getting filled with ridiculously bright street lights because "Brighter = better? Right?". Just enough light to see? No! We need to recreate the sun for this vacant lot all night every night!
It's a crime against nature and a crime against humanity that cities have allowed such a scourge to proliferate, when we have the science and technology for much better LED street lights.
It gets even worse because in order to make up for these discrepancies and distortion, manufacturers just.... turn them up brighter, fundamentally ignoring the problem and only making it worse.
It's bad enough that this affects drivers and pedestrians, but think of all of the animals who don't get a say, and who are even more sensitive to the flicker and lack of color information.
I have to think that if the birds are chirping 50 minutes longer then what are humans doing? 50 minutes longer or even 100 minutes longer?
And how does that affect our sleep which affects our mood which affects our communication and affects our world?