Tower Kill: our burgeoning network of towers for mobile phones, pagers, and digital television kills millions of migratory birds a year - and prevention may be as simple as changing a lightbulb

摘要

It's a rainy night in Georgia, and across the state line in northern Florida. Under a low ceiling on this October evening in 1955, thousands of neotropical migrant songbirds -- warblers, thrushes, vireos, tanagers, buntings -- are moving south. Theywould be navigating by the stars if the skies were clear, but with conditions like this they fall back on their ability to sense the earth's magnetic field. Normally their flight plans would take them across the Gulf of Mexico, to the Yucatan and beyond. Tonight, though, the final destination for many of the birds lies just ahead: the 669-foot-high broadcasting tower of station WCTV, on the Tall Timbers Plantation in the long-leaf pine woods outside Tallahassee. As the first birds approach the tower, its steady red glow seems to draw them in. Disoriented, they circle the structure like June bugs around a porch light. They can't break away. As more migrants join the milling flock, birds begin to smack into the tower itself, the guy wires that support it, and each other. Exhaustion over-takes them and the collisions increase. An opportunistic screech owl, lured by the migrant's distress calls, snatches some of the casualties before they hit the ground.